User onboarding is the process of increasing the likelihood that new users become successful when adopting your product, by providing them with the right tools to understand how a product works and what benefits it provides. The number of apps we daily manage on our mobile devices increases day by day, thus requiring a hard work by designers to create the best user onboarding experience ever. Since it represents the first interactive, direct experience that every user has of an app, every aspect of the funnel represents a significant opportunity for activation and retention of customers in the short- and long-term. In the wide landscape of mobile apps, brain training apps need to have an additional closer look at the onboarding experience they provide. For this type of apps, onboarding does not only encompass more common activities such as user registration and free trial activation, but also the possibility to develop an accurately personalized game experience, tailored to the user’s current cognitive skills and training objectives. Elevate is a successful brain training app available on iOS and Android devices. Recent monitoring of users’ retention and churn rates have shown a huge loss of customers during the onboarding process, thus generating the need to investigate on how to restructure the flow in a way that could help keeping more customers in the loop. The analysis of quantitative and qualitative data with respect to Elevate’s key success metrics has led to a redesign of the welcome pitch, the user registration process, and the post-registration up-sell screen. It has also brought changes to the immediate post-onboarding experience of the first training session, and to the re-onboarding of churned users. A/B tests have been carried out to analyze the behavior of different variants and choose the optimal new onboarding flow. First results show expansion of the onboarding funnel, strengthening of the benefit appeal, and acceleration in user motivation, all factors leading to a higher customer activation and retention
