Role: Lead Product Designer, Three
Rebuilding onboarding at Three during COVID
Transforming registration success from 19% to 71%
+52%
£109k
Only 19% of customers successfully completed registration on their first attempt.
Research revealed multiple points of failure throughout the journey. Customers were being incorrectly routed between login and registration flows, becoming trapped in partial registration states, abandoning email validation and struggling to recover when things went wrong.
With stores closed and app usage increasing rapidly, these issues had a direct impact on both customer experience and operational costs. To created a clear picture of both the customer impact and operational cost of onboarding failures I combined:
Analytics data
Customer feedback
App store reviews
Journey mapping
Call centre insights
Rebuilding the onboarding experience
Simplifying registration and login
Journey mapping revealed unnecessary friction, confusing transitions and recovery paths that failed to support customers when things went wrong.
The redesigned flow focused on helping customers complete registration successfully on their first attempt by:
Recognising partially registered users and returning them to the correct step
Simplifying registration and login journeys
Improving biometric setup
Improving guidance and error handling
Reducing unnecessary friction
Removing a major point of drop-off
Email verification was one of the largest causes of abandonment.
Customers were required to leave the app, locate a verification email and navigate back to the correct point in the journey. New functionality allowed customers to open their email application directly from the app and return seamlessly once verification was complete.
This reduced abandonment and helped more customers complete registration successfully.
Supporting customers through self-service
Analysis showed that many support requests stemmed from a relatively small number of recurring onboarding issues.
A dedicated help centre was introduced to answer common questions and direct customers towards self-service solutions before escalating to chat or call centre support.
This reduced pressure on support teams while improving the customer experience.
The interface was redesigned to improve comprehension, reduce confusion and support successful completion across a wider range of devices and user contexts.
Landing screen
Clearer onboarding entry point
Earlier access to self-service support
Stronger call to action
Welcome screen
Progress tracking introduced
Simpler, friendlier content
Improved accessibility
Password screen
Reduced user error
Improved password visibility
Clearer guidance
Email screen
Clearer verification instructions
Reduced confusion
Better information hierarchy
Verification screen
Open Email functionality introduced
Fewer abandoned registrations
Clearer completion journey
The redesigned onboarding experience delivered significant customer, operational and business outcomes.
