improveD user retention and engagement by OPTIMISing eargym’s onboarding and homepage
eargym - Hearing health care APP
Role: Product Designer
Reading Time: 5 mins
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Background
As the lead product designer at eargym, I worked closely with a cross-functional team, including audiologists, game designers and developers to create inclusive, intuitive experiences for people looking to check their hearing ability and improve their speech intelligibility by regularly training their hearing. The process at eargym was agile with bi-weekly sprints.
Additionally, I contributed to:
Product strategy activities to help initiate changes to meet their North Star metrics and KPIs.
Strategic thinking with prospective partnerships and creating wireframes and mock-ups for pitch decks.
Supporting quality assurance testing prior to releasing updates.
Maintaining their design system and refining internal processes.
Team: CTO, Game developer and Marketing manager
Tools: Mixpanel, Notion, Miro and Figma
The CHALLENGE
APP DATA REVEALED LOW RETENTION AND ENGAGEMENT DURING ONBOARDING AND SUBSEQUENT HOMEPAGE VISIT
App data revealed that eargym’s onboarding and homepage had low engagement and user retention. This resulted in users leaving the app prematurely or skipping sections of the onboarding flow and not being motivated or guided to complete essential activities. Core activities like setting a hearing baseline allow users to track their hearing progress and start their improvement journey. The lack of guidance to key hearing assessments and training also impacted user adherence to the 28-day training programme and recurring hearing assessments.
The result
Refined the onboarding flow
Removed unwanted steps that prompted users to complete tasks such as hearing assessments, that didn’t engage users. This update improved user retention by reducing unnecessary friction and increased onboarding success rates.
RE-DESIGNED THE homepage
Designed a new homepage with a dynamic serving logic to guide users toward key hearing activities, give feedback on their current hearing ability and progress and offer relevant content to educate and motivate users to check, protect and train their hearing. This update aims to boost engagement, increase user adherence and lead users through eargym’s core experience.
The full story
What’s the data sayinG?
I contributed to weekly adherence meetings where team members presented findings gathered from analysing quantitive app data in Mix Panel. These findings informed future sprints and influenced product strategy and designs.
We discovered that:
Users weren’t completing the onboarding flow
The majority of users were not completing the full onboarding flow and tasks built into the onboarding flow had low engagement. Analysing the data showed that users were opting to skip tasks like short hearing checks to enter the app sooner.
Users DIDN’T engagE with the Homepage
Most users did not engage with activity cards on the homepage, guiding them to tasks, resulting in low completion rates of some of eargym’s key hearing assessments. This indicates that the homepage was ineffective and wasn’t serving its purpose of guiding and motivating users.
Without clear guidance or motivation, users were either skipping key hearing activities or dropping off entirely before completing essential steps in their journey, such as starting their 28-day training programme or exploring regular hearing checks.
This lack of direction had a significant impact—not only were users missing the opportunity to track and improve their hearing, but eargym was also unable to measure its effectiveness or demonstrate the value of the product. Without reliable data on user progress, it was difficult to prove the app’s impact on hearing health and drive long-term engagement.
Identifying and prioritising opportunities
Review previous research
Started by looking over any past research, such as insight reports and user models. These gave me an understanding of users’ needs, motivations, and pain points, helping ensure our solutions aligned with our users as well as business requirements.
COMPETITOR ANALYSIS
Analysed both direct and indirect competitors to assess their strengths, weaknesses, and opportunities. This helped identify opportunities that we can explore.
STAKEHOLDER WORKSHOP
I conducted 2x 1.5 hour workshops in which we scoped out the problems and ideated solutions and the core user flow which informed product strategy.
Before we scoped out the core problems and assumptions within our current experience, I started the group off with an exercise to review the current personas to gain empathy for our users and their needs. After we identified areas where the user journey, including onboarding, could be improved or better aligned with user needs and expectations, key drop-offs, low engagement and knowledge gaps in our data.
In response to the assumptions and key issues we identified, we created ‘How might we’ statements. This helped to positively frame problems into opportunities, which is more effective in ideating solutions.
How might we…
communicate the immediate and long-term benefits of using eargym?
How might we…
Motivate users to complete the first core action?
How might we…
communicate reasons and benefits behind completing core activities?
We ideated solutions in response to the HMW statements. To prioritise these ideas, each stakeholder was given 10 votes to allocate to the solutions they believed held the most impact and feasibility.
This voting exercise helped align the team on which ideas to take forward, ensuring that the selected solutions were both strategically valuable and user-centric.
The focus of the next workshop was to map eargym’s core user flow, with a particular emphasis on prompting users to do key activities in the main app experience rather than during onboarding. This exercise helped inform the homepage redesign and surfaced new requirements and opportunities for improvement.
The first iteration of the core user flow had a high mental load on users because it prioritised business objectives like hearing assessments. However, it’s important to consider the mental load of these tasks and how it impacts the user.
To enhance the experience of the first visit,
I added a 2-minute immersive training game between the two hearing checks to reduce the mental load of users’ first visit
These adjustments aim to engage users and increase retention during the first visit and adherence of the 4-8 week training programme.
The solution
Refined the onboarding and increased product value to improve retention
New
Original
We removed several steps from the flow that didn’t engage users. These changes removed unnecessary friction from the flow and aim to swiftly navigate users to the app’s homepage to start eargym’s core user journey.
1 . Highlighted the key features of eargym
How might we:
Communicate the immediate and long-term benefits of using eargym
Designed a value proposition screen that communicates the short and long-term benefits and features users achieve through eargym’s hearing checks and training programme. This aims to enhance user retention during the onboarding process.
2 . Stopped navigating users into branching flows
How might we:
Motivate users to complete the first core action?
The original onboarding asked users early in the flow whether they want to start by checking or training their hearing which later sent them into one of two flows.
Both these paths had low engagement, so I reallocated the hearing and training tasks like ‘check your hearing age’ inside the main app experience so users are guided organically to key tasks on the homepage.
3 . Removed the sign-up and notification OPt-in prompts
The majority of users were opting to enter the app as a guest rather than sign up
In response to this we decided to remove the prompt to create an account and automatically enter the app as a ‘Guest’. Each user is assigned a unique Guest ID which is linked to an account at a later time when they are prompted to create an account to save their progress.
The majority of users were not allowing eargym’s notifications
Excessive, irrelevant notifications can fatigue users and reduce trust and engagement with new alerts. To improve notification opt-in rates, users will be prompted to enable notifications after interacting with the app, fostering trust and credibility in our check and training reminders.
Instead, users will be prompted with a notification banner system I designed. Informing and reminding them to complete system functions and tasks such as ‘creating an account’, which is served after completing their second primary task, having a higher incentive when they are at risk of losing their progress.
Re-designed the homepage to improve engagement and adherence by guiding and motivating users
The homepage was re-designed with the aim to guide, motivate and remind users of key hearing activities of the newly mapped core experience. Users will also receive feedback on their current hearing ability and progress and offering relevant content to motivate users to check, protect and train their hearing.
Original
4 . Guiding And educating USERS
How might we:
Communicate reasons and benefits behind completing core activities?
I created a coherent logic, which dynamically serves prompts to tailored activities and educational content, guiding and motivating users to their next hearing task, or providing information and support on results, such as insights on hearing loss.
Previously, education content was served in a linear format with articles being served daily. I restructured the content by categorising it and linking it to specific activities or results. This enables the today system to pull and cycle content from a growing pool that expands as users progress through their journey and achieve actionable results.
Having a holistic core user journey that guides users through both hearing checks and training activities provides eargym with the opportunity to convert users who primarily use eargym to check their hearing. The ‘next for you’ row and the ‘focus’ card both aim to motivate users to follow the full experience and train their key hearing skills like speech intelligibility.
Motivating uSERS
This focus card aims to improve user adherence by highlighting users achievements, giving feedback on their performance and subscription offers. This will support users and motivate them to complete their training programme and effectively train like focusing on a different hearing skill each week to balance their hearing and train their weakest skill.
ESTABLISHING A COMMUNITY
A scrolling row was developed in response to:
“How might we create a sense of community within the eargym app?”
The aim is to reduce feelings of isolation by showcasing stories and achievements from other users, including those with similar hearing challenges. By sharing this content, the feature seeks to inspire and motivate users to establish consistent and healthy training habits.
Some sections of the new homepage cannot be shared because they include sensitive strategic material. However, I’d be happy to discuss these designs in a private 1-to-1 setting.
The impact
Increased user retention by 55% during eargym’s onboarding.
Most users are now completing the onboarding flow, giving their demographic data and being led to their desired task of ‘checking their training’ or ‘training their hearing.’ In the future, with the implementation of the new homepage, all users will land on the homepage for an integrated user journey.
Increased user engagement on eargym’s homepage by ?%
There is no data or insights into user engagement or behaviour yet because the new homepage requires validation and iterations before being implemented.
NEXT STEPS
The next steps are to conduct usability testing with the prototype to gain qualitative insights into new and active user behaviour and feedback before iterating and implementing.
Key takeaways
Working AGILE WHILE IMPROVING A design system
The role at eargym, provided me with an opportunity to collaborate with a cross-functional team in agile sprints and further refine my prototyping ability and workflow in Figma.
This included:
Developing the architecture and ways of working in eargym’s Figma files
Improving the components library to improve the consistency inside the app and ensure WCAG requirements
Optimising the process in which designs are reviewed and delivered to the dev team, and updating the Figma library
CONTEXT IS KEY FOR EFFECTIVE FEEDBACK
While going through different stages of iteration and asking for feedback, it could be difficult at times to consistently receive effective feedback when presenting designs to cross-functional stakeholders.
It’s important to give context on the designs and their current level of fidelity to be more specific to the type of feedback that I was requesting and ensure feedback was effective at a particular stage of the process. This avoids receiving feedback that is not relevant and avoids the need to make too many minor changes like to the text when placeholder text would have been sufficient while high-level decisions were still made on the designs.
