Overview
During my time at Chatbooks I have worked on the 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 9 million - 20 million, closing the year at over 20 million in GCR for subscriptions. However, our goal for 2023 has been to bring that number to 30 million. 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:
​
Felt our current subscription (12 books/year) was too many books
Felt the book size didn't allow for easy collaging
Users wanted to choose photos outside of the month their book was tied to
Didn't understand how the subscription worked
Wanted the option to add more pages
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.
This flow above shows what the Monthbooks flow looks like. The user chooses their cover type, cover color, and sees a quick screen for how the subscription works. From there they choose their billing cadence (monthly or annually) and the month they would like their books to start. With monthbooks each book is tied to a month and there is no flexibility on moving that or changing it. They proceed to checkout and then are dropped into the monthbooks hub.
This video below shows some of the research and iterations we went through to get to the final version.
After working through those iterations and testing different flows and ideas we landed on the following flow.
With this flow we are able to make default selections so the user can proceed without having to go through choosing each option if they decide they don't want to. If they want to explore, they can tap the book size, cover type and cover color to pull up the corresponding bottom sheet. As they change selections the price changes accordingly so they are able to configure their perfect subscription.
Once the user proceeds forward they are able to then choose their number of books and billing frequency. Number of books allows them to choose 4, 6 or 12 which adds flexibility to our product and the ability to choose annually or when they get a book makes it easy to pay when they want.
Once the user finishes their selections they proceed to a screen that gives them a specific run down of their subscription and how it works before proceeding to the final paywall screen. The final screen (the hub screen) had to accommodate for the major difference of not having a book tied to a month. We had to break the screen so it would have more flexibility while also accommodating our current customers. Our current screen was a calendar style which didn't work with this revamp. I re-designed it to allow users to purchase additional books in the year but moved past years in order to center the customer on their purchase.
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)
Results
Pending release June 2023