Puzzles Engagement
A refreshed onboarding experience
Highlights
A tailored activation journey that boosts engagement by spotlighting benefits, encouraging app downloads, and highlighting key features—all to reduce drop-offs and improve retention.
The Problem
A declining engagement
Our subscription activation screen is our strongest driver for puzzle subscriptions, especially as a ‘bolt-on’ to digital subscriptions. But engagement tends to drop after the first week, signalling that we could do more to keep users coming back. This insight led us to focus on strategies to sustain ongoing engagement.
"How can we encourage puzzles users to build new habits and return to
the platform with varied messaging?"
To tackle this, we held an engagement workshop to pinpoint key touchpoints throughout the product journey—from onboarding to subscription cancellation.
Research
The habit loop
To inspire our workshop, I researched top products that drive consistent engagement, ultimately selecting DuoLingo for its effective use of 'The Habit Loop' to foster lasting routines. My aim was to introduce this gamification model, sparking ideas on how we might adapt it to our own product.
Gathering Insights
Understanding our users
Throughout the workshop, we created three distinct personas to represent the core user types for Telegraph Puzzles. These personas helped us better understand our audience’s needs and preferences, guiding our approach to engagement strategies.
Each team then developed potential deliverables tailored to their assigned persona. We quickly saw that many of these ideas needed a strong foundation to thrive, so we narrowed our focus to the two outcomes with the highest impact.
An activation journey to lay the groundwork for a future onboarding experience.
A performance centre showcasing competitive features.
We decided to prioritise the activation journey as our main deliverable, recognising its impact and feasibility within the user journey.
The chosen outcome
We set out to build a foundational onboarding experience for Telegraph Puzzles, presenting stakeholders with a measured approach that can evolve into a fully personalised journey over time.
Stakeholder Buy-in
Highlighting the need for onboarding
Right now, users start playing immediately after subscribing, often missing features like streaks and achievements. We demonstrated how a strategic onboarding journey could boost retention and engagement by encouraging habit-building and personalisation, outlining our vision in three phases.
After securing stakeholder buy-in, we faced a challenge: the activation journey runs only on web and mobile, while our goal is to guide users to the app, which was built by a third party. I needed to find a way to keep users engaged despite this limitation.
Design Explorations
Creating
A crucial requirement was to retain the first screen of the activation journey—the app download page. While this format works well for news activation, it presents a lot of information that could be streamlined for easier user processing.
Streamlining for engagement
I explored ways to make the information more accessible and landed on a 'chunking' approach—breaking content into clear, digestible steps. Users found this layout easier to read and enjoyed the vibrant visuals and content previews, which boosted their excitement to engage with the app.
User #1
"I love how clear the steps are! The colours are vibrant, and the sneak peeks got me excited to check out the app."
User #2
This layout is so much easier to follow. The visuals pop, and those pack shots really make me want to explore more."
User #3
"Breaking it down into steps is a lot better. It feels less cluttered, and the bright visuals make me eager to dive in."
Final Designs
The final designs deliver a smooth user journey from onboarding to ongoing play. Key features like streaks and achievements are strategically highlighted to encourage early engagement and build lasting habits.