GRETEL

Process

I worked directly with Gretel's founder while managing a team of engineers throughout the development of the project. I also made use of Gretel's marketing team and efforts to gain useful information regarding our users, the targeted market, and the variety of analytical tools used to determine Gretel's internal KPIs.During this process, I personally lead all ux and data efforts while maintaining the project's technical backlog and engineering priorities.
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Key Problems

Gretel suffered from insufficient marketing communications which often confused Gretel's audience on the purpose of the application, its uses, and who the application was geared towards. When it came to actual app usage, many users who signed up did not return to the application after the first use because the app did not match the story originally presented. The questions we needed to answer were:
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Why only 2.5% of monthly users who downloaded the application reached the last step of the onboarding process?
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Why only 3% of users who reached the last step in the onboarding process went through with the registration?
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What led to a <1% App Reopen rate?

Improvements
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I reevaluated the entire onboarding process to identify why 97% of sign-up attempts made by non-US users, which made up a majority of the prospective user base, failed. My research showed the most potential users could not make it through the verification process, which was necessary to start the official sign-up process. In particular, 98% of non-US users were represented in our drop-off statistics while they also made up the majority of app downloads.

Before we specifically tackled this issue, we simplified the the number verification process and moved it to a later stage of the sign-up. We allowed users to enter their email and account information, first, so we could retarget users who could not complete phone verification at the time of download. We also began temporarily storing user data, such as email, so retargeted users did not have to go through the entire registration process a second time if they responded to retargeting within a certain timeframe.

To address problems of retention, we redesigned the overall processes for managing contacts, introduced group functionality, and planned out in-app messaging to increase perceived value in using a secondary, contact-based application.

Reception

Within a month, the drop-off rate between application downloads and phone verification decreased from 97.5% to 74.2%. User registration increased by 18.25% between October 2nd and November 14th of 2018. After the new Groups feature was introduced and shipped, we saw an increase in 5 week retention rates. Though the drop-off in the first two weeks remained unchanged, third week retention and App Reopen rates increased by over 15% and we saw minimal drop-off in the following two weeks.This remained consistent within 6 cycles of new and returning users observed over a five week period.