Onboarding design for Le Qoqo, your favourite app that facilitates booking of cultural activities

How onboarding in cultural activities booking can be fun and boosted by getting playful

EEverybody would like to get back to museums, go to exhibitions and watch a movie on theatres, especially Chloé, our art lover a.k.a. the Qoqonaut that represents the whole range of users of our favourite app Le Qoqo.

Since COVID stroke, she had no other choice to accept the situation as it is and that lead us to :

In 2020, the cultural and creative economy lost approximately 31% of its revenues.

It’s even more crucial for companies from the cultural sector to stand out from the competition. That’s why I decided to accept the challenge from Le Qoqo to improve the fluidity of the end-user booking experience in order to increase the number of their users otherwise called Qoqonauts in a 2 weeks sprint.

In order to do so, I will focus on the onboarding process of the Qoqonauts.

👱‍♀👱‍♂ My client Le Qoqo

Le Qoqo is a start-up founded in 2021 by Setti and Antonin. Setti realized that there was a way to make culture accessible to anyone :

This project represents an attempt to make the world of culture more attractive by offering fun content, adapted to everyone but still demanding!

Le Qoqo is a cultural platform for booking cultural activities : on-line courses, screenings, conferences and so on. Every month you can book the activities of your choice with your cultural subscription. It is possible to do these cultural activities at home online, offline or in situ. Another way to express the concept is to understand that :

“Le Qoqo is a project that also responds to my frustration as a hurried Parisian, who would like to reallocate the time spent organising her cultural outings in order to get more out of them”.

🤹 The Challenge

As Le Qoqo is a web app that facilitates the booking of cultural activities through a monthly subscription, to better use the application it is more convenient to get registered. That’s all is about the brief Le Qoqo gave me : creating a fun onboarding for their soon-to-be launched cultural activity booking app.They were interested in the approach of a UX designer to achieve it, this is where I came in. I’ve worked during 2 weeks to understand Le Qoqqo users a.k.a. the Qoqonauts and come up with a solution that would meet their needs.

🔬 Discover

To get the project started, I organised a kick-off meeting with my clients Setti and Antonin to go into the details of their business and the project they are entrusting to me. I was then able to understand their why according to Simon Sinek, what they do precisely, who they do it for and their long-term vision of their product.

By doing this meeting with the client, I was able to construct a kick-off Mural to synthesise and understand both user needs and business . I used this tool to be clear with my UX process: planning, research and design phases of the project. It helped me to be more accurate in order to visualise and document the hypothesis and assumptions at the start of the project.

In a nutshell, here are the few important points that were important about Le Qoqo :

• the goal of the app is to access culture in an easy way.
• the brand value is to promote culture to everyone.
• le Qoqo thinks that their Qoqonauts face an overload of activities and one of the aim of the web app is to facilitate the booking and bring diversity in culture activities in a feeling of joy and dicovery.
• Le Qoqo would like to engage their Qoqonauts in a friendly way on a long term relationship on a subscription basis

📷 Secondary Research

Even though I was familiar with the world of culture, I wanted to study it as closely as possible and have a snapshot of this particular universe.

According to “Rebuilding Europe, the cultural and creative economy before and after the COVID-19 crisis”, the new EY study on the cultural and creative industries in Europe published on 26 January 2021, the cultural sector evolved as follows along the COVID-19 pandemic crisis:

Before the crisis, a thriving economy

• 7.6 million jobs, twice as many as the telecommunications and automotive sectors combined,
• Faster growth (2.6%) than the European average (2%) between 2013 and 2019, generating a trade surplus of €8.6 billion, and confirming the EU’s place as a major cultural power.
• 643 billion euros in turnover, i.e. 4.4% of the European Union’s GDP and a total added value of 253 billion euros.
• The European creative economy was also at the forefront of major technological, societal and cultural transformations: digital innovation, gender equality and youth employment are part of the DNA of Europe’s creative sectors.

After the crisis, culture on the verge of economic suffocation

Strikingly, CCIs (Creative and Cultural Industries)are among the sectors most affected by the economic and health crisis, along with tourism and air transport.

• A drop in activity of more than 30% on average and up to 90% in certain sectors or countries,
• In total, a loss of turnover of 199 billion euros
• A considerable risk to employment (7.6 million people in 2019) and vocations,
• A weakening of small and medium-sized businesses and mostly independent authors in the face of the financial stakes of creation and the power of digital players.
• In France, EY estimates a 32% drop in the turnover of French CCIs, i.e. a “loss” of 28.5 billion euros by 2019.

That being said, EY considers that : Much more than just another “sector to be saved”, the Creative and Cultural Industries can be a weapon to get out of the crisis, at a time when europeans need economic recovery more than ever. One the challenges have been identified as priorities for the recovery and growth of the creative economy is to mobilise the imagination and creative forces of culture to meet the challenges of tomorrow.

In that context, the innovative concept of le Qoqo needs even more scritiny regarding its market. To start and get to know Le Qoqo’s french market, I did some competitive analysis.

Le Qoqo have direct competitors such as CulturMoov and Des Mots et des Arts as well as Oopsie box that only cover a part of the scope of Le Qoqo’s offer.They offers respectively:

• online visits and culture,
• art history courses through guided tours of exhibitions and art history lectures,
• Various discoveries concocted especially to break the routine and enjoy the activities that surround you every day together.

On a larger scale, you can find some digital giants offering speciliazed platform such as Amazon Explore and Airbnb Experience. Amazon Explore is a tool that allows users of the platform to book live virtual experiences hosted by local experts while Airbnb Experience focuses on the same niche for in situ activities.

In the end, Le Qoqo’s unique selling proposition is the diversified, easy access and time-saving booking solution that drives you through the overload jungle of cultural activities.

📉 Survey

In order to comprehend the general trend, I first published a survey adressed to people who have an interest in culture : art lovers or people deeply interested by the topic of culture on a broader sense.Within the process of booking a cultural activity, the survey enlightened the following trends :

The action of booking is felt as a constraint by our users except under certain conditions. Regarding the account creation, is not an activity that triggers enthusiasm as indicated below.

And here’s what the respondents actually think about creating an account in order to book a cultural activity even when they fancy the targeted activity.

From the exploration, the same trends emerged from the qualitative & quantitative analysis and they can be summarized by this quote gathered from an anonymous participant of our survey :

“Everytime, it is time consuming”.

🎤 Job to be Done Interviews

While waiting for our survey responses, I conducted 5 Job to be Done interviews. Most of the interviewees were art lovers or deeply interested by the topic of culture. The aim of those interviews was to understand their culture journey and their relation with art in general.

🎯 Affinity Diagram

Gathering all my research, I was able to visualize the findings into an Affinity Diagram that helped me understand what our interviewees thought and felt across their cultural journey when booking a cultural activity.From the Affinity diagram I used to download the data of the Job to be Done interviews, 2 down points stands out:

• the account creation can discourage the Qoqonaut to the point he won’t do it.
• the buying part is mandatory and also a painpoint even for the users who don’t mind. When we dig deeper, the buying process is accepted as long as it is simple and reassuring as defined by one of the Qoqonauts :

From these facts, I extracted the goals for Le Qoqo’s onboarding:

• How might we encourage the user to register right away when he discovers the platform for the first time while making him happy during it as if he was playing a game ?
• How Might we encourage the user to achieve his first booking (until the payment) while making him feel rewarded

In other words, the formulation could appear as follows :

“HMW improve the fluidity of the end-user experience of the QOQOnaut when he/she discovers the platform in order to increase the registration of first-time users as well as increasing their booking ?”

Another way to put it is to express this question in the form of a problem statement :

From this formulation of these challenges, I went crazy on ideation with the combined method of worst ideas and Crazy 8.

From the Worst Idea and Crazy8 ideation, I applied the MoSCoW method to extract the features of your digital tool:

🏺 Chloe’s user flow

From this cultural ecosystem, I set up the user flow and get focused on the happy path of Chloe completing a nice cultural activity with the example of booking Chloé’s conference for next Friday.

🖊 Medium Fidelity Wireframes

Chloe wants to book a conference for next week-end, she complete her first booking and get a discount on your next cultural activity. I designed the screens accordingly.Here are the medium-fidelity wireframes

I did usability testing in guerilla mode and get very positive feedback and had to do more than expected to get suggestions for improvement from the different users.

From the testing feedback, I learn from the future users that the fun part was well understood/it was easy to achieve and even “fun” was mentioned from several testers. and I gathered some informations for my future iterations such as :

• the Qocoin should appears with its icon to be better understood
• the Next button is not necessary at the beginning

• the notification for the successful creation of Chloe’s account should appears on the next screen
• the survey should be reduced to fewer options and can be skipped
• and of course the onboarding needs a back button not to be stuck.

I had to stick to previous creative ideas and elaborate on them to create the categorised universes of Qocociné,Qococréa and Qocoexpo for le Qoqo’s style tile.

📲 High-Fi Prototype

From the medium-fidelity wireflow, I iterate the design as follows to achieve the high-fidelity wireframes that I will display as a prototype.The idea is to ease the process to the point it is so simple and quick that you enjoy doing it and rewards Chloé with Qocoins, the cultural subscription currency of the Qoqonaut.

WWelcome on my onboarding for Le Qoqo.

First Chloé needs to sign-up to create your account in order to subscribe. To incite subscription, Le Qoqo propose to Chloé to get her first chosen activity, the conference Find’art for one euro. As soon as Chloé gets registered, and created her subscription account, she becomes a Qoqonaut, a privileged member and get rewarded with 2 Qocoins, Le Qoqo’s cultural currency, to persue her cultural journey with Le Qoqo and continue to book more cultural activities.
Then you will have a small survey to help us personalize your in-app experience, that’s why we ask some questions to know more about your habits related to culture and art to propose personalised cultural activities to enjoy and discover the relative types of Qoqonauts such as for example Qoqocréa or Qoqoexpo that will make her discover their specific cultural universes.

The idea is to ease the process to the point it is so simple and quick that you enjoy doing it and rewards Chloé with Qocoins, the cultural subscription currency of the Qoqonaut.

The desiderability testing showed that people found Le Qoqo cheerful, friendly, cool and spirited which is aligned with the company philosophy : to promote culture for everyone in a cool way but with respect for artists and culture.

We can have a quick look at the desktop version for responsiveness.

KEY LEARNINGS AND NEXT STEP

From this project, I learn a lot about

• the cultural and creative industry and its standards,
• the account creation best practices in use as well as
• the buying process effective rules.

I need to perform more usability testing on the mobile high-fi as well as the desktop version and iterate to make the most of this onboarding design. As well, it could be interesting to check the design colors for accessibility. For example, the buttons could be modified to reach the standards required.

Thanks for your time, I would greatly appreciate your feedback.