UX Challenge: Bondle Onboarding Flow

The Goal

For teams of small to medium businesses, Bondle is a SaaS product that unifies email, messaging, documents, tasks, and eSignature functionality.

Instead of jumping from different apps and tools to accomplish different tasks, Bondle allows its users to have a centralized source of information, reduce search anxiety and increase productive zen.

In this UX challenge project, my goal is to re-imagine the onboarding experience of the Bondle app on iOS.

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Problem Definition

Below is the current onboarding flow of the Bondle app, from the moment a user downloads the app from the App Store until the moment they can start a new conversation, which I assume is where the app’s value offering starts to shine.

I don’t find any major problem with the current onboarding flow. So far, I have been able to set up an account successfully and managed to make use of the app’s main features of creating new conversations, tasks, and documents.

However, there are a few issues that I noticed can be improved:

1. App Store listing information is lacklustre: There’s simply not enough information on the App Store listing page to catch my attention. If I don’t have the strong purpose of testing out Bondle or already know about the product beforehand, I don’t think I would want to give it a try. I believe improving the copywriting on this page will have huge benefits on the user acquisition rate.
2. Asking for notification permission without context: Immediately after opening the app for the first time, users are asked to allow notifications. We should definitely postpone the notification step and setting up a good context before prompting user to allow notifications from our app.
3. Asking users to sign up before letting them know about the app features: Users are asked to log in or sign up before getting to know what are the benefits of doing so. We should at least give users an overview of what it is that they’re getting into, that way, users would be more motivated to continue.
4. PIN number: I see that we need to have a necessary security measure to enhance the credibility of the app. In addition to PIN number, I think we should make use of iOS’s native FaceID capability so that there will be less friction for the users.
5. Uninspring onboarding slides: The illustrations are small and overall the slides feel a little bit unimpactful. It should make me excited to try out the features but right now it does not.
6. What’s next: It’s great that there are already some conversations waiting for me after I signed up. However, it does not prompt me for my next action. I think that in our case, prompting users to sync their contacts, import their current conversations, or complete a predefined checklist will make users more engaged and propel them into real usage.

Scope and constraints

This project would only cover the onboarding experience of the Bondle iOS app. My definition of the onboarding experience starts from when users open the app for the first time until they can make use of the app’s main features, which are creating new conversations, tasks, and documents.

My personal constraints regarding this project are time and knowledge. This being a UX challenge, I tried my best to conduct secondary research and drew a lot of my own assumptions, instead of properly consulting with the stakeholders or doing user research.

Identifying Users

I concluded that the main user segments of this product are most likely:

• SME owners and managers
• SME team members

They have a need to communicate and collaborate both internally within their teams and externally with their customers. Big corporations are most likely not the target users since they would prefer a much more customized and established solution.

Their collaboration needs may include:

• Email and messaging
• File and document sharing
• Invoicing, document signing
• Task and todos
• Voice and video calls
• Meetings and appointments
• Manage team members
• …

User’s pains

• Email overwhelm
• Having to jump between multiple apps
• Skeptical of new products
• Changing is a lot of effort
• Security attacks
• Having to sign up for yet another product
• App reliability issues

User’s gains

• Able to manage all communication channels effectively in one place
• Everything is where I need it to be
• No downtime
• Easy to set up and invite team members

Onboarding goals

From the assumed user understanding, I think the onboarding should accomplish the following objectives:

• Hook user in, let them see the benefit right way: This helps increase the chance that user will stay after signing up
• Get user past the initial hurdle: Removing the friction along the way to ensure user can hit the ground running
• Appear professional and legitimate: As a newcomer to the market, creating a good first impression is key

User flows

This is how I imagined the new onboarding flow could be:

1. Start screen
   1. Onboarding slides
   2. Sign in options
2. Onboarding slides
   1. All your conversations in one place
   2. Central access to documents and tasks
   3. Top-notch security
   4. Get your work done, Bondle-style
3. Sign in options
   1. apple
   2. google
   3. email & password
4. Set up FaceID
5. Turn on notification
6. Provide name
7. Conversations Empty state
   1. Import existing conversations
   2. Sync contact prompt

Mockups

Here are some quick mockups of how the UI could look like. Most of the illustrations are from the official website. Ideally, I would need to spend more time to work on these illustrations or commission a freelancer to do it for us.

Here you can see I’ve tackled some of the problems listed above:

• Don’t force people to go through the slides if they just want to sign in: If user already have an account with us, they can skip the slides by tapping the Sign in button. For most users, at this phase of our product it would be signing up so that’s the preferred option.
• Big, prominent and attractive visuals: Help capture user attention and convey positive app qualities
• Progressive disclosure: Asking user for information one at a time
• FaceID: Allow user to authenticate using FaceID
• Ask for notification permission after user has signed up
• Prompt user to sync contact after intial state

Finishing Thought

I tried limiting myself in the 2-3 hour time slot but ended up taking more than that (about 5 hours including research time). Of course, there are still tons of work to be done, this is just barely scratching the surface.

My personal challenge for this project is determining the product’s value offering. While it is pretty straightforward in the benefits it brings to users, I’ve had a hard time figuring out its unique selling point that can solidify its position in the market. I’m assuming that its biggest competitor right now would be Slack, built for everything collaboration and the ability to integrate with pretty much every other productivity apps out there. Excited to see how Bondle will manage to bubble to the surface and become a staple app for its users.

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