Understanding inactive users
A research journey
The context
Utoppia its a fintech app that offers an account in the USA without the need of travel. It launched in early 2022 in several LATAM countries and one of the problems that we had is that 60% of users complete the registration and KYC process, get their accounts approved, but 80% of these users show no activity after registration.
I worked on this research with the UX Lead Juan Falabella. Together we organize the study, conducted interviews, analyze the data and worked on app improvements.
The timeline
Research goal
🔍 Understand the reasons why some users do not activate their accounts.
Research methodology
For this research we combined quantitative and qualitative methodologies.
For most of the research projects that we had in the company, we always started with a survey to gather quick feedback. We weren’t offering any incentives for the interview so we wanted to get as much information as possible. In the same survey, we invited users to join us in a user interview.
Recruitment process and tools
As mentioned earlier, the first step was to get the emails of the users. We requested these from our Data Team and created the email to send the survey.
We discovered that sending the emails personally, with a real person’s picture, name, and role, significantly improved conversion rates. To avoid triggering spam filters, we sent around 15 personalized emails each per day, using the same copy and our real signatures.
54
Interviews scheduled
36
Interviews
16
Inactive users
54 users scheduled a call with us and 36 of them showed up. The challenge that we had here is that from the moment we sent the email until the call, most of them activated their account. So only 16 were inactive users, our target for our research.
With the other 20 we decided to ask some questions about their experience with the app to get additional information taking advantage of the 1:1 interaction with them.
These were tools we used:
Invitations
Survey
Google Forms
Scheduling
Calendly
Interviews
Google Meet
Interviews debrief
FigJam
Documentation
Dovetail
Sample questions asked
The questions that we asked at the interview were mixed between getting to know the user, understand why he/she/they haven’t activated the account and what would be the ideal product.
Some examples of these questions are:
To start, could you tell us a little bit about yourself—how old are you, where do you live, and what’s your job?
Could you tell us why you decided to open the account?
How do you plan to use the account?
How would you think your ideal product would be?
When interviewing, we saw that usually when they were telling us why they open the account they would start explaining their reason of inactivation.
Analysis process
Once we finished with the interviews, we analyzed their responses and wrote several findings we had. Among them we had that they weren’t motivated enough to activate it, they were just curious, they are used to using another platform, etc.
Sensitive information has been blurred for privacy reasons.
From the findings, we then moved on to the insights and HMW (How Might We) questions. We had 3 insights and I’ll give an example of 1 of them:
INSIGHT: Users feel curiosity and interest for Utoppia because it’s a new alternative to earn their salaries but do not have a need or motivation to migrate their money to a new platform.
HMW: How might we motivate users to bring their money to Utoppia?
Once we had all this information, we had an ideation session were we answer the HMW question for each of them.
Sensitive information has been blurred for privacy reasons.
For the example above, we had some ideas like:
Building more trust
Showcase the app’s benefits
Outputs/deliverables
Once we had the analysis of the research, we then moved on to work on some ideas to improve some flows in the app.
👉 I invite you to read the case study where I share how we Unlocked user engagement based on this research and utilizing other tools like gamification.
All the information (recordings, transcriptions, results, etc.) was documented in Dovetail.
