Quizizz has an activation rate of ~20% for US users. In an attempt to boost this number, the team hypothesized that users do not understand Quizizz's USP in their first interaction, and hence drop off. This project is an attempt to communicate what Quizizz offers to their users in an interactive manner.
Overview
Boosting the activation rate of new users by showing them what value Quizizz adds to their practice in the very initial stages of their interaction with the product.
Results
Process
In the months prior to this, we had experimented extensively around user activation. Our top contenders were:
None of these seemed to work as expected and we were trying to give one final boost to our activation metrics before the back-to-school season.
In the midst of this emerged an idea, that we are maybe not communicating our features well enough.
Onboarding emails, banners, and pop-ups are easily ignored. Additionally, there was no onboarding on our product. This is where a new user lands after signing up:
Hence, it is safe to assume that we did not do a good enough job with onboarding new users. Without any education on how to use the product, users saw us as any generic presentation or quiz-taking tool, and quickly dropped off. The value that Quizizz provides was only visible to long-term users.
A hypothesis formed up:
A new user does not understand the value that Quizizz provides over others due to our weak feature communication. If they saw value in Quizizz, they would start using it more actively.
Quizizz offers a diverse set of services:
The idea was to educate a new user about all these features in the hopes that they would retain and activate.
The leading idea was to showcase this in the first time experience post signup. Let's see how it evolved over time.
The explore page (home page) did not have any cues as to what a new user should do. It only suggested activities to host and topics to teach. These were high commitment actions and users were hesitant to enter the funnel.
What if we could surface some low-commitment actions? These could include explainer videos, exploratory features, or just a disclaimer of all the features that are available at their disposal.
We hoped that with these numerous short actions, explainer videos, and guided tours, a user would find value in some feature and would activate in that flow.
Although the idea was exciting, we quickly realised the problem.
The initial feedback was that it is too overwhelming. We were trying to communicate everything in one go, with equal weightage to everything. Maybe this was too much to consume for a new user.
Let's revisit our list of features again:
Out of these:
Hence, we decided to prioritise our top 3 features (points 3-5) and try to educate our users about these first.
Our bet now lied in our top 3 features: diverse question types, AI-powered teaching, and student accommodations.
Along with the content, teachers were also interested in how the content would be shown, i.e. the gameplay experience. The medium presentation mattered to the teacher. This was only a small part of the last version, while it was a leading factor in piquing users' interest.
The next idea was to give the teacher a taste of the gameplay experience in the signup process itself.
Here the teacher would complete a part of their profile that they usually did during the signup. By utilising different question types, we can create an onboarding experience that gives you a first-hand experience of the final deliverable.
One their profile is complete and they know what the audience will see, we can carry on the experience to show how our 3 USPs are enhance the experience of the audience.
This attempt had some complications:
Along with this, we were also concerned about drop-offs due to the additional effort and non-conventional signup forms.
Maybe we could complete the signup normally and then focus on the feature ed.
In this attempt, the signup was completed normally. The demo happened on the first time interaction with the product.
This was obviously a step-up because of two reasons:
The end state was also changed to make it more search-first, that being the easiest action.
With lesser commitment in their actions, the teacher could explore the platform freely and without distractions.
In the midst of this emerged another idea:
The signup completion rate was close to 60%. This meant that around 40% of users will never get to see the in-product value with our experience, and some of the 60% cohort might even skip or drop-off during the onboarding, reducing the number even more.
Maybe if we had this experience pre-signup, all users could experience the value that Quizizz provides in a more non-invasive and less-committing way.
In this attempt, we changed the CTA on the website from 'Sign up' to 'Try it now'.
This came with some possible risks:
An alternative touchpoint for the same was suggested. This would surface as its own separate section on the website to preserve the signup button:
Contrary to popular opinion, we wanted to try out replacing the signup button in a more aggressive approach. For the sake of this experiment, we were ready to tank the signup numbers in the lesser-traffic months to have stronger activations in the back-to-schools season.
We also wanted a better medium for education that can show our features in a more expressive and interactive manner. For this we utilised our interactive video feature.
In this, the user would watch an explainer video with some follow-up questions in between. This video would be a Quizizz explainer, while in the questions we can ask them how they think that feature could help them in their practice.
This is how it turned up:
The idea seemed good. There's one issue we faced though. With such an aggressive demo option, we left out the personalisation bit. Now the entire demo was generic and Quizizz centric.
Maybe there was some hope to make this thing a little more custom, a little more personal.
The previous idea was tweaked to add a bit of personalisation to the experience.
The first step now involved asking the user their subject and grade, and the subsequent interactive video would be tailored to these parameters, plus a few others like location and language.
This seemed a good experience, with minimal effort and maximal value communication.
This experience seemed amazing, aligned with all our goals and communicated value in a delightful manner. But we asked ourselves an important question now: Does every teacher necessarily need to experience the demo?
Most teachers get to know about Quizizz via word of mouth. They share the features and gamification of Quizizz in their staff rooms and over lunch. While sharing teachers primarily showed each other the gameplay experience.
If we assume that a majority of teachers already come to Quizizz with a vague idea of the gameplay experience and features, does doubling down on it again provide any additional value? In that case we should double down on the vast library and ease of creation rather than reinforcing the features.
Maybe if we keep the solution search-first, teachers who know about Quizizz can jump right into action, and the ones who don't know about it will learn about all our features, and that's what we finally did.
Final solution
This is what the final solution looked like:
Let's look at why this worked:
Extras
This project was shipped out in phases. We started out with the very last screen, and then slowly built our way up to the demo and personalisation.
Teachers loved it. We immediately saw higher activations and higher signup completion rates.
Apart from boosting activation, we saw an unexpected use case of this feature - an easy way for teachers to pitch Quizizz to their admins. Teachers went with the link in hand and the admins really liked the presentation. This was followed with a boost in leads for the sales team.
All in all this was a visual-rich, exploration-heavy, rigorous project that I enjoyed!
