Notion PRO — Onboarding
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About Notion
Notion is a do-it-yourself (DIY) home monitoring solution. Their multifunctional sensors can detect things like open doors and windows, temperature, water leaks, and sounding alarms. Event notifications allow customers to stay on top of what’s happening at home and Notion’s paid professional monitoring service (Notion PRO) sends urgent alerts, group texts, and can dispatch local authorities on users' behalf.
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Problem Statement
How might we ensure that Notion PRO customers understand how to use their PRO system effectively?
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TL;DR
Fewer than 10% of PRO v1 users activated even a single event type to be professionally monitored. Through analytics and user research, we identified and addressed educational gaps. Today, 95% of our PRO registrants have at least one professionally monitored event type on their system.
Background:
Notion is a DIY home monitoring solution that allows users to customize which events their sensors monitor. Notion’s native mobile app alerts users when the door opens, the smoke alarm sounds, the water heater leaks, and more. But what if Ryan misses an alert because he silenced his notifications during his morning meetings? Notion PRO, a 24/7 professional monitoring service, addresses this issue by bypassing do-not-disturb mode with Critical Alerts, sending group text messages, making a chain of phone calls, and automatically requesting assistance from police or fire departments in emergencies.
Problem Statement:
Once a customer registers for Notion’s professional monitoring service, how might we ensure that Notion PRO customers understand how to use their PRO system effectively?
In an effort to provide end-users with timely, professional help when they need it while also reducing false alarms, our primary goals for PRO users are that they know how to:
turn on and off an event type to be professionally monitored,
arm and disarm the system (to escalate opening doors and windows), and
de-escalate a professionally monitored event via a four-digit pin.
Build and Learn: PRO v1 (MVP)
Given time and resource constraints (a tale as old as time), we had to rely on the current architecture and existing functionalities of Notion’s native mobile app to walk users through PRO onboarding for our MVP. We identified the most important things for our users to know and brainstormed as a cross-functional team the most feasible ways to surface this information given our resource constraints.
Educational Carousel:
Though we knew we could (and ultimately would) better set our customers up for success, our MVP included an educational carousel which required users to swipe through screens containing each precious nugget of information before we allowed them to advance to the Home screen and get started with PRO.
PRO v1 Educational Carousel
Email Series:
I worked with Notion’s Marketing Team to create the content and images for an email series that helped get folks up and running (happy and sad paths). The series reiterated the information from the educational carousel at different touchpoints throughout their journey.
PRO v1 Email Series
UI/UX Challenges:
We ran a small, intensive user study (10 Notion customers, split between iPhone and Android devices) on the registration, onboarding, and escalation flows prior to launch which helped prioritize our backlog, but we knew we’d also need and want to rely on user analytics to better understand organic PRO usage.
Information Without Context:
The carousel was shipped as part of a combined registration and onboarding process. For the users who did read, the screens provided little context about how PRO features fit and functioned within the app interface.
The setup survey results from the intensive user study (below) indicated that users found the onboarding easy and the interface intuitive. Good. Great! Right?
Wrong. During user interviews later on in the study, we learned that although users believed they understood the PRO interface, there were significant gaps in their comprehension. For starters, users thought that every event type on their system was being monitored as soon as they signed up.
How did you find the process of turning on event types to be monitored (5-point scale)?
Was it clear which event types were being monitored at any given time (5-point scale)?
Users Didn’t Read:
To help assess the performance of the carousel as an education tool, we tracked the time users spent on each screen. Disappointingly, but unsurprisingly, users spent an average of only one second on each screen leaving no time for them to read essential content, never mind digest it. In addition, once the carousel was cleared, there was no way for these users to access that information again.
Users Didn’t Turn on Events For Monitoring:
Of all PRO registrants, fewer than 10% turned on even a single event type to be professionally monitored.
Users Didn’t Engage with Arm/Disarm:
We required users to arm their system to let us know when to escalate opened doors and windows; however, monitoring button taps made it crystal clear that people weren’t engaging with the arm/disarm feature. What wasn’t clear is whether this was intentional or not.
Home Screen UI:
Outside of an escalated event, the PRO v1 interface was so subtle that many users glanced right over it. If they didn’t recall what they “read” in the informative carousel, they’d probably only figure things out through trial and error. To remove any confusion and improve comprehension in v2, we introduced the PRO status card to explicitly state to the user how many event types are being monitored at any given time. We highlighted the event type icon and shield indicator in PRO-branded yellow to help the user make the connection between that number and the tasks currently being monitored. OH—and we also made the arm/disarm button look like, well, a button.
PRO v2 Task-oriented Onboarding Flow
Armed, Non-emergent + emergent task types monitored
Arm/Disarm Reminders:
In an effort to further engage PRO users to arm and disarm their system, we introduced an opt-in feature that sends notifications to iOS users prompting them to arm their system when they leave and disarm their system as they return. This feature leverages the geofence of their system to send push notifications asking the user and arm or disarm reminders are sent as the exit or enter their geofence, respectively. This feature received glowing feedback and was a HUGE win coming out of Beta testing. We hope to bring it to our Android users soon.
Dynamic Info Card:
Arm/Disarm Education
Build and Learn: PRO v2
When we finally got a second go at the onboarding PRO users, we moved the majority of education to a comprehensive PRO landing page that walks prospective and current users through all things PRO. I also worked with marketing to create a tailored onboarding email series that guides PRO subscribers through specific steps depending on where they are in their customer journey.
That left us creative breathing room in the app to focus on a task-oriented onboarding flow and Home screen UI updates to better set our customers up for success.
Task-oriented Onboarding Flow:
As soon as the necessary registration tasks were complete, we prompted the user to turn on the event types they wanted to professionally monitor straightaway. But we didn’t stop there—we turned on all sounding alarm and leak tasks (event types with the highest property management risks) by default. Today, 95% of our PRO registrants have at least one professionally monitored event type on their system. HUGE win.
After the “Easy Enable” screen, we continued to prompt users through a series of [optional] steps that would set them up for success while using their PRO system: Turning on Arm/Disarm Reminders, toggling on critical/urgent alerts, saving “Notion PRO” as a contact, and adding additional contacts to your escalation path.
No event types monitored
Non-emergent event types monitored
Dynamic Info Card:
We introduced a dynamic PRO-branded info card that meets customers where they are in their PRO journey. The cards recommend changes to their settings that would improve their PRO experience and/or offer teachable moments to the user depending on where the user is and what is happening.
Dynamic Info Card:
Turn on Critical Alerts
Disarmed, Non-emergent + emergent task types monitored
Dynamic Info Card:
Arm/Disarm Reminders
Ongoing Insights:
App Analytics:
Worked closely with my iOS and Android Mobile Engineers to set up comprehensive mobile analytics (via Google Analytics) to understand organic user behavior. We review these metrics collectively on a monthly cadence and craft user stories based on the data.
PRO Dashboard:
Worked closely with my Product Owner and Data Scientist to build a comprehensive PRO dashboard to keep tabs on key PRO metrics in live time. We review these metrics collectively on a monthly cadence and craft user stories based on the data.
User Surveys:
Worked closely with Marketing Team to set up PRO Onboarding Survey, PRO NPS Survey, and PRO Cancellation Survey which we automated to populate in our #survey slack channel to keep a consistent eye on our customer experience, including insights for feature optimizations and requests. We review these insights in live-time via slack threads and collectively on a quarterly basis.
Customer Outreach:
Worked with Backend Engineers to set up a slack channel which logs each PRO escalation—when we see that a certain system is an unusual escalation activity, we flag in live-time and assign a Notion Customer Success Representative to reach out directly to the user to understand their pain point(s) and educate the user on the PRO escalation experience.