Why Order Matters and The Importance of User Test Onboarding

When I joined Acorns in 2014, I got to work designing the app, the bulk of which turned out to be onboarding. Acorns was the first app to do full bank level account creation on mobile with name, address, SSN, questions to determine a suitable portfolio and KYC, or know your customer verification. Every other bank and financial institution at that time had customer sign up on the web, then download the app to sign in, if they even had an app.

Tracking the progress of registration printed out on the wall, 2014

A Seemingly Simple Question

One part of onboarding that no one, including myself, thought would be an issue were two seemingly mundane checkboxes, asking people if they were:

1. A US Citizen

2. A US Resident

But to our surprise, when people got to these questions in user testing, you could see them stop dead in their tracks and their brain start to melt. Many would even say out loud some form of “wait, how can you be a citizen but not a resident” or “how can you be a resident without being a citizen” or “why are these separate questions”.

Someone could be a US citizen but be living abroad, so not residing in the US. Or someone could be a resident in the US, but not be a citizen, on a visa for example.

But in the moment, being confronted with these questions for what was likely the first time, and with the added pressure of someone watching them in a user testing session, it was overload to try to parse what these two questions were asking.

Understanding the Requirements

To solve this problem, I met with legal and compliance to better understand why we needed these questions answered in the first place. This was where my first revelation came from, and my introduction to why it’s so important to talk with legal and compliance to truly understand what the requirements are.

this would have lead to frustration if we told them, sorry, you can’t actually have an account

It turned out that being a US Resident was required to open an account. If someone wasn’t a resident then we couldn’t report taxes for them, so asking this question after they had already signed up and started filling in information would lead to frustration if we then told them, sorry, you can’t actually have an account.

The second question, are you a US Citizen, was only necessary for identity verification. So someone could check this or not depending on their situation, and as long as they passed KYC we could open an account for them.

Challange Assumptions

I can see how without the full context the original designer came to the conclusion to include these checkboxes on the address screen, they seem somewhat address related.

This is why user testing is so important. What seemed to make since in the design was totally baffling customers, and the implications of these two options and the confusion was causing a massive hiccup in registration and would have drastically impacted our conversion rate.

The Solution

So the solution, which is still live to this day, was to ask right away on the account creation page if someone was a US Resident. We also extended this to confirming they were over 18 years old and agreed to various terms as the product has expanded. User cannot proceed until this box is checked.

Later in registration, still on the address page, we asked if customers were US Citizens. We later defaulted this to ON as well since the vast majority of people joining Acorns were citizens, so this remove one more tap for most people.

Once we split these two checkboxes onto separate pages, we ran fresh user testing sessions and not one person mentioned anything about this again.

Case closed! But we would have never know without user testing. This is why it is so important to mix qualitative and quantitative research. If we hadn’t uncovered this issue, we likely would have seen a big drop in conversion on the address screen and maybe concluded that people just weren’t comfortable giving out their address, or that it was too long to fill out, we would have missed the real cause just by looking at the data alone.

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