Subs for All
by chatbooks
OVERVIEW
During my time at Chatbooks I have worked on the Chatbooks mobile app for iOS and Android, desktop web app, and TVos App. However, most of my time has been spent on the Chatbooks mobile app with a focus on increasing the TAM (Total Addressable Market) and ARR (Annual Recurring Revenue) through subscriptions. Subs for all was my solution to how we could improve our current Montbooks subscription to open up the market and convert more subscriptions.
CHALLENGE
Monthbooks, which is our current subscription product does well - in 2022, my team increased our ARR from 9mil - 20mil within the calendar year. However our goal for 2023 has been to bring that number to 30mil. Monthbooks is a great product but has its limitations such as being capped at 30 pages per book, one book size, and a 12 month payment cadence where the user receives 1 book per month. My goal was to remedy out current shortfalls while also creating a product that could fit the needs of more customers.
ROLE
UX/UI Designer
THE PROBLEM(S)
Monthbooks is a great product, it's a monthly photobook subscription that encourages users to choose 30 photos from that month and print their book. Although churn hovered at 4-5% which is under the average 6-8% we wanted to figure out a way to open up the product for more customers.
Through over a year of data and user interviews we discovered overall that users wanted more flexibility. However, some of the trends we discovered were that users:
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Felt our current subscription (12 books/year) was too many books
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Felt the book size didn't allow for easy collaging
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Users wanted to choose photos outside of the month their book was tied to
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Didn't understand how the subscription worked
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Wanted the option to add more pages
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Wanted the ability to change the title of their books
Something unique about our subscription product is that it's a physical product that the user needs to create and print. With that, there are a variety of challenges, in addition to the list above, that needed to be considered.
ITERATIONS
We (being myself and my Product Manager) went through competitive analysis for subscriptions in order to get an idea for how we could refine and improve ours.
I started with 10 wireframe flows, refined that to 4 high fidelity flows, tested those, gathered insight and scrapped them. I started over and after multiple iterations I was able to come up with a flow that was not only easy to use but easy for our users to understand.
From there I created a first version and an ideal version so our team could be aligned on what we would release with vs. what the ultimate goal was. We tested the flows with variations multiple times to ensure we had an ideal experience.
STRATEGIC RELEASE
My PM and I worked strategically on how we could release the experience. We wanted to release some features in our current subscription Monthbooks so we could test how they performed while the new experience was being developed.
We decided on a release schedule as follows:
- Variable pages (add more than 30 pages to a book)
- Titling (allowing user to change the title of the book)
- V1 release (completely new flow)
HIGH FIDELITY
Day 2
One of the final steps in the design process was for me to come up with how the app should actually look utilizing our existing design system.
Note: you will see some notes on this page, these are notes for if we decide to integrate this project after hack week. We intentionally left some features out in order to fit within the time frame and to give the developer enough time to build it within the 3 remaining days.
ANIMATIONS
Day 3
While the developer started implementing the designs, I created a few animations in After Effects to liven up the experience. I exported those files as json files with Lottie in order to make the implementation easier.
THE DESIGN
