Digital Unboxing

As designers, we strive to make our apps as easy to use as possible. We want our users to love using our apps, to be delighted at their look and feel of them, and to tell everyone that this is the best app they have ever used.

 

My client’s app is fairly large, with many, many features. This is wonderful because clients can do almost everything they need to do on the go. Unfortunately, this also means that some features could be a little harder to find, even if usability testing told us otherwise. The app has grown so much over the years, but along with its growth, not much has been done in the way of teaching users where to find what. Many users don’t even know about many of the features that they carry in the palm of their hand. And shockingly, some don’t even know how to make a payment.

 

Introducing: Digital Unboxing

The idea of Unboxing comes from the physical act of unboxing a product that was just delivered to you. Think about the iPhone: the packaging is stunning, it has that “new” smell, and it comes with everything you need such as a power cable, charging brick (in the past), and a little booklet that tells you what’s what.

Digital Unboxing should provide the user with such an experience – a welcome, and a guide to the most asked-for features.

 

The research

Digital Unboxing has been attempted before, with research, usability testing and concept designs done. However, it was never rolled out. This gave us the chance to build and improve upon work that has already been done.

I did my bit of research, though, to find out what the best practice would be for such an experience, and what to avoid.

 

UX Design & Concept Phase

After getting everyone on board with the dos and don’ts, I kicked off with a few user flows to show onboarding steps for a new app user, and to identify spots to insert prompts, how-tos and to-do lists.

I played around with a few flows and wireframes, and improved on the designs as we uncovered more details about the project and what exactly business needed from us to get stakeholder buy-in.

 

All of the UX work that has been done on the project, so far

 

A user flow showing possible entry points for unboxing
A user flow showing possible entry points for unboxing

 

 

Wireframes that show what the designs might look like in app
Wireframes with a few component concepts

 

The Design

This is an ongoing project, and we’ve made quite a few iterations to improve the flow, deciding what is shown when, what it should look like, etc.

UI concepts for unboxing

 

Tools

Sketch, Miro, InVision

 

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