Sorting in Sphere
Refining a key feature of the app
What is stopping our users from fully utilizing Sphere?
Sphere is a new product to help real estate agents manage and reach out to their sphere of influence to gain more business. Most real estate agents use a combination of CRMs, reminder apps, and automated campaign software to achieve this. One of Sphere’s key features is the ability to sort your contacts into different relationships to help Sphere’s algorithm know which contacts to prioritize each day. But when it was first launched in beta, about 2% of our users managed to get past sorting and into the app. Just a week later, not a single person was actively using Sphere.
Balancing stakeholders’ priorities and users’ needs
We were in a precarious position. From talking to our users, there was a clear issue with the onboarding and sorting experience - most people don’t want to sort every single contact before gaining access to the product. But the CEO of the company was a major stakeholder on this project, and he had researched and developed the idea of sorting contacts into different relationship categories a couple years prior - so it was really important to him that this feature continued to exist.
We met with him several times to fully understand his expectations and explain our concerns and observations. Eventually, we were able to find a compromise and move forward.
Sphere’s sorting experience in 2021
Multiple iterations to get everyone onboard
I began by cleaning up the UI, and making the sorting experience a little more intuitive. The real improvements were made to the onboarding flow. After brainstorming with the stakeholders, I created an entirely new onboarding experience. On a user’s first login, they would import all their contacts, sort only 5 of them, and then move into the rest of the product and learn how to use it with those 5 contacts as examples. This way, users would experience Sphere’s value up front, further motivating them to return and sort the rest of their contacts at their own pace.
Sphere’s sorting experience in early 2022
Paving the way for the future
Sphere was recently released, and we’re now retaining 80% more users because they are able to get past sorting and to the real point of the product. And while the algorithm may not have all of the information on all of their contacts from the beginning, we’re still able to provide a valuable service and our users have more options on how they want to user our product.
I still hope for an onboarding process that’s even more streamlined, but I expect that will require more time and many more conversations to get enough buy-in. In the future I hope that in lieu of any sorting at the beginning, we will serve a modal after a user contacts someone in Sphere for the first time that lets them choose their relationship with that person.
Sphere’s sorting experience in late 2022