Project Impact
By reducing the flow down from 8 to 4 screens and putting privacy controls at the forefront, the new experience led to not only significantly higher adoption, but also improved retention.
Increasing sign ups and retention by redesigning the onboarding flow.
Nearby Friends is an opt-in Facebook product that allows you to share your approximate location (neighborhood or city level) with the friends you choose. People mainly use Nearby Friends to see who's around to hangout or see who's visiting from out of town.
After joining the Location Products team at Facebook, I became the Lead Designer on Nearby Friends and started looking for ways to improve the overall experience and grow the product. One opportunity area became obvious after looking at product metrics and past research: the onboarding flow for new users.
1. Users thought their exact location would be shared to their entire friend graph, which made them uncomfortable and unwilling to try the product.
2. Selecting friends to share with felt cumbersome. People expected to see a list of friends, rather than Facebook's traditional privacy selector.
3. Users didn't understand why they had to consent to location permissions so many times. It also wasn't obvious they needed to select "Allow all the time".
By reducing the flow down from 8 to 4 screens and putting privacy controls at the forefront, the new experience led to not only significantly higher adoption, but also improved retention.
