Streetbees is an app where people complete surveys about their everyday life and get paid to do it. After nearly five years of growth they wanted to redesign key elements of their app so that new users stuck around and returned each day.
The challenge
Product people often talk about leaky buckets. A healthy flow of users coming in but too many holes through which they can leave the product for good. Such was the case for Streetbees. As an app where people can earn money for doing simple tasks, acquisition was relatively easy. However, along the journey from sign-up to engaged user there were too many opportunities to lose people.
Approach
We identified the work that could be done with the broader goals of conversion, engagement, and retention and created a roadmap of work for several months ahead. We aimed to improve the experience by:
- creating a rapid and simple sign-up flow and onboarding;
- helping users earn their first payment within minutes;
- curating the first collection of surveys so that users felt there was plenty applicable to them.
We also set out to:
- boost completion rates of surveys and completion rates of unpaid ‘screener’ surveys;
- improve the design of the app with a focus on usability and accessibility.
We tested with users on a weekly basis and gained a deep understanding of their motivations and behaviours. As the weeks went by our attunement to users paid dividends, allowing us to create successful approaches quicker and with fewer iterations.
A new first experience
Prior to our work the app greeted newly signed up users with a series of simple, unpaid tutorial surveys. These tutorial surveys were designed to help the user understand key aspects of the app before unlocking the real surveys; the paying ones users really wanted to see.
We recognised that locking those stories away and forcing new users to complete arbitrary tasks was missing an opportunity. These arbitrary tutorial surveys:
- gave us no useful data;
- did little to incentivise the user;
- felt like they were contrived, meaningless exercises—not the best way to help people believe that we want real experiences shared.
We did away with these gatekeeping tutorial surveys and replaced them with a single introduction survey followed by a handful of real, paying surveys.
The introduction survey told users all about the app but also collected some useful data that would have otherwise bloated the sign-up process. This meant we could justify paying users for it, which for a survey app is a massive win. Nearly all survey apps require users to amass a pot of roughly £5–£10 before getting their first payout. It can take weeks and users hate it. Bottom line, our redesigned onboarding felt meaningful, collected useful data, had users earn their first payment in minutes.
Keep it simple, stupid
Not all surveys in Streetbees are paid. There’s a special group of surveys known internally as ‘Backgrounds’. These surveys gather broader data that is used against lots of other paid surveys. For users this means less repetition in surveys.
The way it works is that doing an unpaid background survey unlocks several connected paid surveys. Sounds simple but the design was failing to make this clear. As a result users saw no incentive to complete unpaid surveys, especially when there were plenty of paying surveys to be done.
The challenge was to help users understand that these unpaid background surveys had a clear benefit. We wanted to:
- make it ridiculously clear that doing a background would unlock more paid stories;
- increase the amount of stories completed in a session.
Capture the moment
Streetbees is really interested in getting an understanding of how people feel about what they’re doing as they’re doing it. However, this poses a challenge in social situations. We heard from users that when they’re out in social settings they’d rather not be spending that time filling out a survey.
We created Snap now, chat later to solve this issue. As the name suggests, users can take a photo of what they’re doing and return within 24 hours to complete the rest of the survey. In addition to the photo the app captures some vital information such as branded products or location but with the aim of not taking up more than 1 minute of a user’s time.
Team
Maeve O’Rourke · Product Manager Sam Judge · Product Designer Vykintas Valkaitis · Android Developer Rodrigo Cardoso · iOS Engineer Jonathan Aguele · iOS Engineer Humberto Pinto · Full Stack Engineer Charles Washington de Aquino dos Santos · Full Stack Engineer Ramya Mahesh · QA Engineer
