First impressions,
driving user activation at Pi
I worked with Inflection, a leading AI company, to launch & grow 'Pi' – an innovative artificial intelligence personal assistant. I led a project that sought to address a critical challenge — user activation. Only 9% of users were returning to the app for more than one session. Our brief was to try and improve this rate, specifically, we wanted to see how many users we could get to exchange 20+ messages with Pi.
The first step was to get a better understanding of our users. What behaviours were common amongst those who did activate? And, what was missing for those who didn’t? Through data analysis and a survey of users we learnt that:
Speaking to Pi was magic: Data analysis revealed a compelling trend— a notable percentage of users who initiated a call with Pi were more likely to stay engaged. User feedback underscored this, with many describing their first call as a pivotal 'aha' moment.
The blank page was not: Users that came to Pi because they were curious, were encountering a significant hurdle. Faced with a blank chat screen, these more passive users struggled to think of topics to have a conversation with Pi about. This often resulted in users leaving their first session without experiencing a meaningful interaction with Pi, making them far less likely to return.
The process
Armed with these insights I began crafting a design strategy that guided users to their first successful interaction with Pi through a conversational onboarding flow. Firstly, analysing which topics led to the highest engagement and curating them into a set of conversation starters that we could display to new users.
Secondly, as soon as users chose a topic, prompting them to try to “Call Pi”, and experience that magical moment. I took these strategies and crafted them into new UI components and flows that replaced that blank landing screen with something engaging and inviting.
Solution
Before: Blank page paralysis
After: Users are guided to a successful first interaction