Upon getting onboarded, our users were greeted with a generic landing page that directed them to the app but was not deemed useful in teaching the user on how to experience the product; we learned that users preferred an onboarding tutorial.

Our testers were not keen on sharing their email with an unknown product upon signing up. We learned that they would have preferred to experience the product firsthand as anonymous guests.

These observations were confirmed after conducting a Funnel Analysis on Amplitude that tracked how many users moved along along the onboarding process from initial sign-up up to eventually interacting with the Timeline. We were surprised to see that no users continued with the sign up process and over 46% ended their session immediately.

The Timeline posed a conflict to our users' mental model on scrolling vertically. Typically, a vertical scrolling gesture on a trackpad or mousewheel is associated with the intent of moving upwards or downwards. Instead, our users were surprised to see a "zoom and pinch" effect that stretched and expanded the Timeline instead of moving along a y-axis.

In order to save real-estate on the extensions menu, Chrome unpins newly installed extensions by default, thereby hiding stateful signifiers by which users would normally refer and interact. Our users were confused most of the time and were not able to access important features because they couldn't access the extension icon in the menubar.

Nearly all of the users whom we interviewed prior to the launch expressed that Acciyo was unique in the way it presented articles dynamically along a timeline- however they expressed confusion at its novelty. We hypothesized that a brief onboarding tutorial would have a positive impact on the overall experience and thereby positively impact retention.

The data supported our hypothesis that an onboarding tutorial will positively impact retention. According to our Amplitude report,  the week-1 retention rate for our users who completed the tutorial was 29.1% compared to 11.7% for users who did not engage with the tutorial.

The first sign up flow had too many social authentication options to choose from. Our users expressed sentiments of "analysis paralysis" at being forced to choose to sign up with Twitter, Linkedin, Google, or email. After a round of user-testing, we learned that Google is the preferred social authentication choice for a quick sign-up process.

The current version of the Timeline displayed articles that were tightly packed together which negatively affected readability. It was also difficult for users to scroll vertically without experiencing a "zoom" effect which challenged exisiting mental models on how vertical scrolling works.

The redesigned version would create more categories to separate information, include affordances to encourage user-engagement, and make use of space to enhance readability.

We made use of Floating Action Buttons to enhance discoverability and increase engagement. This was our solution to the Chrome update which unpins the icon when folks download our extension.