MEETUP
An onboarding flow that helps new organizers feel more confident about starting a group
OVERALL CHALLENGE
Our goal was to design a holistic onboarding experience that actively inspires and guides customers to find value and success in creating a group and hosting their first event on Meetup. I lead the design of experiments that tested ways to improve Meetup’s ability to acquire and activate/onboard new customers.
PROCESS
Left: Moderated usability sessions and user interviews. Right: Organizer experience mapping.
–Facilitated design sprints and design studios
–Feature prioritization exercises with product and tech leads
–Created user/task flows and wireframes
–Developed all sorts of low to high fidelity prototypes
–Audited Meetup’s onboarding flows
–Competitive research and analogous examples
–Mapped out the organizer’s user journey
–Fullstory analysis (heat-mapping, session replays)
GROUP START TESTS
We displayed motivation cards on the member explore/discover page that pathed users to motivation-driven organizer pages.
HYPOTHESIS 1
Only less than 0.25% of members start a group every month, with the common theme being the general lack of intent or motivation to start a group. Based on qualitative and quantitative research, we identified 4 customer archetypes, and tailored a module and series of 4 organizer landing pages around those personas. We believe speaking to members’ motivations will increase group starts.
Results from split test show +5.8% in group starts and +5.6% in subscriptions. Now launched to 100% globally.
Next iteration: How might we pre-populate/personalize the group create flow specific to the motivation a user has selected? How might we tailor coaching specific to these goals?
HYPOTHESIS 2
42% of customers bail at the first step, many of which never had clear access to valuable information on becoming an organizer. Moreover, only 6-7% of customers complete the start flow and become subscribers. We believe that if we direct customers to a (generic) organizer landing page right before start the group create flow, then more customers will have the information they need to feel confident in creating a group.
Based on user research, we learned that new organizers feel less intimidated when we provided with information that 1. reinforces the ease of starting a group and 2. shares organizing how-to tips. We also saw that presenting them with event formats (ie. Hang out, Learn, etc.) can help jumpstart and simplify the process of creating their first event.
Results from split test showed less group starts because we’ve weeded out lower intent customers. Those who did see the landing page, dropped off 30% less than those that didn’t see the landing page.
GROUP CREATE TESTS
The old group create flow (below) has not been iterated on for almost 5 years, built in an old tech stack that makes it hard to quickly implement tests on. The UI/UX was also outdated as well as falling below industry standards.
Our approach was to build a beta/baseline/V-zero new group create flow in a new tech stack with design components that would help set up our squad for faster future iterations. The beta experience allowed for the ability for a user to save a draft of their group, leave, come back, and pick up where they left off.
EMAIL NOTIFICATIONS
With 90,000 people entering the group start flow every month, only about 11,000 were completing it and paying for a Meetup subscription. The current “win-back campaign” was 1 email, sent 24 hours after the person bails the group create flow, immediately offering a 50% discount on the subscription. We knew there were more thoughtful ways we could be speaking to this audience, and saving the discount message for when it was actually needed to drive conversions.
The strategy was to test a variety of messages at different stages of the funnel to begin learning what resonates most with people at different points in their journey toward starting a group. Replacing our one discount win-back email, we were going to launch a full campaign that triggered based on user actions throughout the journey.
Messaging types included:
Coaching - editorial message on how to be successful
Inspirational / testimonials - how Meetup has impacted other organizers’ lives
Informational - directly addressing common worries
Discount / the value of a Meetup subscription
