How might we create a seamless user flow for users to set-up their trial game server at our platform?
Hostari is an instant game server hosting company. We believe in making hosting as simple for novice gamers and fast and advanced enough for expert gamers.
Our current design only allows creating a server for one game. But if we want to scale and attract more users, we need to be able to create a flow where users can easily select from a list of games and create a server.
We decided to revamp our onboarding to ensure we can easily adapt to the nature of the market we’re in while making the best first impression to our users.
Before starting this project we were faced with a few constraints. The first one is that we had a small user base and we struggled to find users that were willing to be interviewed. Second constraint was we had to finish this feature in a month.
Because we lacked resources for a user interview, a fast solution we thought of was to look at our current customer support threads and see what kind of pain points are users usually encounter. Next, we conducted competitor research and also looked at the onboarding flows of our competitors.
Key things we found out from our users:
What we observed from our competitors:
We created a two-step flow for users to set-up their server. First, we display available games on the home page. After the user selects a game, they are directed to the sign-up form, which includes information on what's included in the plan and emphasizes that there is no payment required for the first 24 hours. This flow allows users to review our plans and try our service before committing to a subscription.
After testing out internally, we deployed a 2-step process in setting up their account and simple sign-up form.
If the user is logged-in, they can also create a new server from the dashboard without logging out of the platform.
Another feature we built is an Infotainment Library. This serves as a library of videos showcasing modding plugins users can try to enhance their gaming experience. This is for more advanced users, but beginners can definitely try them because we provided tutorial videos.
During our first weekend of release, we received 181 sign-ups, 50% of which were true sign-ups. We also increased the number of available games to ten by December 2022 and peaked at 643 monthly subscribers.
Despite the success, we recognize that there is still work to be done to improve the overall onboarding experience, including reaching feature parity with competitors and adding more appealing games to our platform.