First 30 Days Diary Study
Key Problem
Only 6% of customers who created an account were completing onboarding and making a deposit onto Stash.
Objective: Understand why users were not making a first deposit or investment.
Team
I was a senior UX researcher at Stash, during which I worked on the new user investing experience. I collaborated with two other researchers on the diary study. Along with them, we created “study groups” with many of our cross-functional partners in design, engineering, product management, and marketing, asking them to follow study participants along their 30 day study. We had consistent participation from 15 partners.
Process
In our initial discovery, we found that that much of our existing knowledge about sign up was atomized to specific moments along the user journey. We decided a longitudinal study would help us paint a clearer picture of what the holistic experience from signing up to making the initial deposit and first investment looked like for our customers.
We recruited users and conducting the study on dscout. And over 5 weeks we:
Followed 22 participants from pre-sign-up to the end of the free trial (30 days).
Together with weekly diary entries, we also did two rounds of interviews with 6 users, first to observe them signing up and again when they’d finished their free trial.
Held weekly “study groups” with our stakeholders to encourage active participation in research.
Outcome
Along with many small changes, bug fixes, engineering clean-up, we had two major discoveries:
Customers were not comfortable signing up for a free trial before seeing what the Stash app looked like or being able to explore the features on their own.
After signing up, customers were not sure what steps to take next to get started.
With this knowledge, we prioritized a series of changes to our onboarding experience that culminated in a larger redesign.
