How data-driven UX and copywriting doubled a music streaming app’s listeners

Onboarding: an app meeting a person for the first time

Every day, more than 50k users download and open our music streaming app Anghami for the first time. The first few minutes they spend in the app play a crucial role in having the user come back the next day. Through the course of several months, we modified the customer journey and tried different copywriting, leading to twice as many users completing onboarding. Day-1 retention increased by 19% as a direct result of onboarding.

While it is crucial to quickly teach new users how to use features like creating playlists, getting them hooked fast is about instantly giving them music they enjoy. So, our priority as designers is to figure out a new user’s tastes so we can quickly give them the music they want. And we want to achieve this in the first few minutes of using the app.

Our onboarding involves several steps, and we consider it complete when users choose their favorite artists. While designing onboarding I needed answers to these questions:

  • Does requiring a user to complete signing-up affect user onboarding?
  • What encourages users to continue onboarding, and what sets them back?
  • Are the screens we’re adding to onboarding helping users complete it?
  • How can copywriting affect onboarding, especially in the very first screen
  • To what extent will proper onboarding affect users’ retention?

The very first screen

Onboarding starts from the very first screen after opening the app. A welcome screen that highlights our features is a nice preamble. Although the features swipe automatically every few seconds, 15% of new users try swiping manually because they’re engaged with what Anghami offers. We can already tell that users who swipe manually have a 12% higher chance of retention. With that fun fact aside, the big colored button is what I’m focusing on.

We tested different texts for the Continue button, shown below. Which do you think…