User Onboarding // Audacy
First impressions matter. A lot.
So we crafted a new native onboarding experience to get users tapped into audio their own way.
Lead product designer
ROLE
Jun 2024 - Dec 2024
TIMELINE
The challenge
Audacy listeners mostly follow one radio station without discovering the breadth of other wonderful audio that could relate to their interests. One of the major challenges in the platform was a messy search experience as well as recommendations not being delivered in a way that’s enticing to users. A major point of improvement for Audacy is the initial touchpoint that happens when a new user creates an account. There was no true onboarding experience, so usually, listeners would simply search for the station they already know, and not discover much beyond that.
Hypothesis
By asking users to select their interests early on, we can provide more relevant content on their For You page even before they start listening. That way, listeners will see engaging content and will have reasons to keep listening on the Audacy platform instead of looking for similar content somewhere else.
Features and initial requirements
Intro to onboarding screen following new account creation
Content picker: Selecting cities and categories, teams, genres, and audio topics
Choosing stations, shows, or podcasts related to previously selected interests
Marketing requirements: display modals for personalized ads, location settings, and notifications
Market research and competitive analysis
I conducted a content and feature analysis on our competitor’s onboarding experiences. We needed to see how other services in the radio/audio space sort, reveal, and recommend content to new users. Tasking some of our stakeholders and colleagues to go through these onboarding experiences and give honest feedback on what worked for them, and what didn’t.
What we analyzed:
Information architecture and grouping
Average onboarding completion time
Complexity of items nested within categories
Visual impact a vs. accessibility
The team unanimously agreed to use a visual approach that didn’t impact accessibility. A large portion of Audacy users is on the older side, which is always taken into account. New features should be simple and feel good, especially when asking users to complete a task before engaging with the product.
Version 1
V1 user test summary
I set up a round of unmoderated user tests on UserTesting.com with 5 randomly-selected participants to give us feedback on the experience. The participants were between 35-65 years old, and were not familiar with Audacy.
The good stuff
4 of 5 Participants appreciated the intro to onboarding screen, especially with regards to the time commitment the onboarding would take.
3 of 5 Participants liked being able to select main interests first, then drilling down to stations and podcasts that are related to those interests in the following steps.
5 of 5 Participants said the For You page being populated with their selections felt good, and they expressed it would entice them to explore the content. It felt more personal.
5 of 5 Participants liked the warm and inviting aesthetic of the screens, and said it left a good impression.
What could be improved
1 of 5 Participants didn’t think the intro to onboarding screen would be useful to him due to it being too general, and as a sports listener, he wanted a sports-oriented version instead.
2 of 5 Participants said they would prefer the selections to all happen on one screen.
3 of 5 Participants suggested to have related content populate dynamically on the same screen, which would reinforce the relationship between the content entities shown to them.
Customized intro screens
Our stakeholders and station owners (as well as some participants) expressed a desire for curated intro screens to reinforce the station brands available Audacy. We had the ability to track if new app installs were coming from affiliated pages, giving us the flexibility to generate station or genre-specific versions. For example, if a user was viewing an article posted by a sports station, then installed the app, we were able to attach that station’s branding to the template.
Version 2
In the following version, the designs and flows were updated to include dynamically-generated recommendations based on genres or categories the user has selected. This way, we would shave off an extra page load, and establish a clearer relationship between various content entities.
MVP and Limitations
Due to limited engineering resources and time constraints for this project, the onboarding rollout eventually had to be pushed into multiple phases. With the way our datasets were currently structured, category and content relationships had to be built differently. As a result, a leaner MVP onboarding was prioritized ahead of the version seen above. In MVP, instead of choosing categories of interests such as Sports or Music (etc) first, users would see local or popular stations & podcasts in the initial view. Recommendations based on the selected items would generate dynamically from there.
Consolidated MVP Userflow
After finalizing capabilities and tech limitations with stakeholders and the engineering team, I assembled a userflow to reflect the MVP state of our onboarding experience to our engineers and product managers.
