Background
With the rise of short-form video popularity, Yahoo launched a new entertainment app targeting the younger audience offering premium bite-size content with interactivity and commerce offering. We saw over 60 percent of our audience was under 35, and we had 27 percent of generation Z users, who were under 24. Considering the fact that our existing Yahoo users are in their mid-thirties, this was a really good sign to acquire younger users to the Yahoo ecosystem.

Framing the Right Problem
Activation → Retention
How might we increase user sign-ups and have them come back to our app?
Pain points in Exisiting onboarding
Yahoo Play’s existing onboarding looked like this…
Problems with it
- These dancing people on the very first screen don’t exactly tell what this app is about
- It doesn’t engage the user
- It doesn’t give any clear reason to users why they should sign up
- When new users land on the home screen after signing up, they barely have a clue what these titles mean and what to do or expect
- Getting rewarded while simply consuming the content is the biggest selling point of this app, but the users have no clue what the reward is and how to get it
- Existing Yahoo sign up flow is too complicated, long, and frustrating
Solution
Engage users immediately. Bring them to content fast and inform the perks of using the app. Give them reasons to sign up.
The "hack"
We built a functional version of this in 2 days for the hack. In the proposed onboarding, we brought the value prop of the app right on the first screen. The biggest selling point of this app is users can earn points while engaging with the content and then they can use those points to shop at the built-in shop for real rewards. We gave users a taste of this whole workflow without using a boring tutorial. We showed them they can get a reward if they “play along”, once they proceed, they can watch a short content and take part in a quiz, just like they would do in the app after signing up. Once they play with the content they immediately earn points giving them a reason to sign up to claim those points to get the reward.
User flow from left to right

Final design
Results
Some stats improved, but completion of sign-up didn’t improve much. The significant thing here is, sign-up attempts improved by 16%, but completion of sign-up only increased by 1%. Yahoo’s sign-up flow was already in discussion for being too long and frustrating and that eventually barred us from acquiring more users for this product.

Take Away
- Brainstorming with engineers can be magical. Not only we can get fresh “non-designer” perspectives and learn about technical pros and cons right at the brainstorming phase, but they also learn to appreciate designers and what we do as they get familiar with the design process closely.
- Yahoo properties needed a better sign-up flow, all our properties were getting hurt by this (luckily a separate team had been working on that).
- For retention, we needed better content. The core mechanics of the app and business model needed major rethinking. All of these were later addressed when the app was shut down.