So you spent hours polishing your landing page, examined every word carefully, interviewed everyone you could about that neat little welcome screen you added to your app.. But still: Users don’t sign up. Kin uses 3 powerful UX principles to get that new user to sign up and stay, which I’d like to show you now!

What’s Kin? Well, lets have a look at their welcome screen (yes, they have one, but its just the start of their onboarding):

Welcome Screens

Kin is a social habit forming app. That means you set up habits that you want to develop, and share your progress with your friends and other people on Kin. That way other people can hold you accountable for your goals, and cheer for you when you progress. Kin structures their onboarding in four simple steps, which we will walk through together:

Raise interest

The introduction pages show what you can expect from the app, and raises the tension. This is also where Kin makes promises. Essentially they promise you habit trackers, chats, community and progress. Put in other words: Kin promises a healthier lifestyle.

Note that Kin puts only one single information on every page. This is also known as chunking, and can help you to communicate important and potentially complex information to your users.

Foster Creation and Investment

Pre sign-up: New users create assets in the app.

Kin doesn’t ask you right away to create an account. Instead, first of all you create a habit and choose your user name, and they let you upload a pic and a bio as well if you like. Notice again how each screen is only making you accomplish a single task… This brings us to our first principle:

Principle 1 of 3: Sequencing

Sequencing breaks down a complex task into smaller, simple steps. Here, the task is to set up an account, which is broken into habit selection, positive feedback, username selection, pic upload and bio creation.

Pull them over the Anxiety Gap

Sign-up: Entering phone numbers can be scary.

Creating something gives us a sense of accomplishment, which is further pushed by those bouncy animations in Kin. And the more we create, the higher the perceived value of what we already have. This means Kin has now interested user, who attribute a higher value to the app due to their freshly created assets. Now Kin asks for a user’s phone number, which can feel quite uncomfortable to some. This is what I call here the “anxiety gap”, and this is where principle number three comes in to pull the user over that gap:

Principle 2 of 3: Loss Aversion

We hate of letting go of what we have. Remember, we just created our habits, and we have set up our whole account. All of these things we just created will be gone if we don’t sign up!

Value attribution along with loss aversion can really help your conversion rate. However, it’s easy to overdo. Remember to not introduce unnecessary friction when you let your users create assets right in the beginning. Noticed that little “skip” button right at the bottom? This button’s task is to reduce friction, as new users should be able to achieve their initial goal as quickly as possible.

Deliver and integrate

Post sign-up: Kin keeps up the momentum and integrates you into their community.

Once Kin users sign up, they are introduced to the community (given we ignore the subscription offer ;) ). Interestingly, Kin also offers to connect with other users.

Principle 3 of 3: Social Proof

Seeing what others do can give us a sense of guidance. For Kin, users cannot only see that others are already using Kin, but also inspect their habits. Placing this information in the onboarding flow can reinforce a users commitment, and build trust.

It also means users are linked to a few other people who they can exchange their progress with. This again reinforces the integration in the community, and it’s getting harder to leave Kin and all those people again.

However, the users Kin suggests to connect with are people that a new user doesn’t know yet. As these accounts have probably low relevance for the new user the community effects might be not as strong, and the user might even skip connecting with these people.

An issue I’d like to conclude this section with is the app’s home screen: After the sign up users end up on a relatively complex UI, with five menu options on the bottom, and many other UI elements all over the screen. For new users, this is quite a bit to figure out now. On the other hand I have to admit that most of the UI elements are mostly understandable and self explanatory (at least to me). Yet, the exploration of the whole thing just takes time, and if you take a few minutes to read through Kin’s app reviews you’ll quickly figure out that many people couldn’t find some important functionality. But although there is some room for general improvement of the UX/UI, I think that Kin definitely made a good job with their onboarding flow.

Key Takeaways

• Break down complex information into small chunks.
• Break down complex tasks into simple steps.
• Let new users create assets within your service before singing up, which increases the value attribution.
• To get users to create an account, ask them to sign up when value attribution and tension are the highest.
• After signing up deliver your promises — but remember to keep up the momentum so that your users come back.

I’m not affiliated with Kin but feel free to check it out: https://kinapp.co/