Overview
At the Financial Times, I explored how onboarding could become more than a short welcome flow and instead play a bigger role in retention. While many users completed sign-up or downloaded the app, fewer than expected became regular, engaged readers. Most onboarding experiences were focused on introducing features or getting users through the first session, but didn’t do enough to help people experience real value early or build lasting habits.
This project looked at onboarding through a broader product lens, not as a one-off interaction, but as the beginning of an ongoing relationship between the user and the product.
The Challenge
For subscription products, the most valuable users are the ones who return regularly and make the product part of their routine. However, many onboarding journeys are still built around short-term metrics such as completion rates, clicks, or preference setup. The opportunity at the FT was to rethink onboarding around more meaningful outcomes: helping users get value quickly, return more often, and build habits that increase retention over time. The challenge was understanding why some users quickly became regular readers while others dropped off after only a few sessions, and how onboarding could better support that journey.
My Role
As a Senior Product Designer, I led the discovery and strategic thinking phase of the project. My role focused on bringing together user research, competitor insight, and internal stakeholder knowledge to shape a clearer onboarding direction that could scale across different FT products.
User Research
I reviewed interviews with users and prospects to better understand why they subscribed, what they expected, and what happened during their first few interactions with the product. A clear pattern emerged: many users arrived with strong intent. They wanted to stay informed professionally, improve their financial knowledge, follow global events, or access trusted journalism. But the product experience didn’t always reinforce that motivation quickly enough. Many users wanted clearer direction on where to begin, what content was most relevant to them, and how to get immediate value from their subscription. For lighter users especially, the breadth of FT content could feel overwhelming. While depth and quality were clear strengths, some users struggled to know where to start or how to turn occasional reading into a regular habit. There was also an expectation that the product would feel smarter from day one, understanding their interests and guiding them towards relevant content rather than leaving them to self-navigate.
Internal Discovery
I also ran sessions with teams across subscriber engagement, customer care, marketing, B2B, FT Edit, and growth. Each team looked at onboarding through a different lens. Growth teams cared about first-session actions and conversion. Engagement teams focused on repeat visits and reading frequency. Customer teams surfaced common friction points and support issues. Other teams focused on relevance, product discovery, or audience-specific needs. What became clear was that onboarding meant different things to different teams, which often led to fragmented experiences and inconsistent measures of success.
Competitor Analysis
To benchmark the FT experience, I reviewed onboarding across premium news products including Wall Street Journal, New York Times, Bloomberg, The Times, The Economist, and Washington Post. Most of these products performed strongly in trust, content quality, and brand credibility, but many onboarding experiences still felt transactional. They were often focused on getting users through sign-up, placing them on a generic homepage, and leaving discovery largely to chance. I then looked at products known for strong onboarding and retention, including Duolingo, Blinkist, Grammarly, Evernote, and Strava. These products were much stronger at guiding behaviour. They used clearer motivation capture, progressive onboarding, quick wins, progress tracking, reminders, and personalised journeys that encouraged users to come back. The contrast was useful. News apps often focused on access, while the best consumer apps focused on habit-building. That became a key direction for the project.
Key Insights
The biggest takeaway was that users do not become loyal through explanation alone. They become loyal when they repeatedly experience value. We also found that the “aha” moment looked different depending on the user. For one person it might be discovering relevant market coverage. For another it could be setting up newsletters or building a morning reading routine. Motivation was strongest immediately after sign-up, but dropped quickly if unmanaged. That meant the first few sessions were disproportionately important. Finally, onboarding didn’t just happen inside the app. Email, push notifications, recommendations, and support touchpoints all played a role in shaping whether a new subscriber became an active one.
Design approach
Based on the research, I developed a three-stage onboarding model. The first stage focused on activation, helping users experience meaningful value quickly through relevant content, smart setup, and clear next steps. The second stage focused on habit formation, encouraging repeat behaviour through reminders, continuity, and routine-building mechanics. The third stage focused on expansion, gradually introducing deeper features such as newsletters, audio, premium tools, and personalisation once regular usage had been established.
Wireframing & Iteration
nce the strategic direction was clear, I translated the framework into early wireframes to test how onboarding could feel in practice. I explored low-fidelity concepts for first-session journeys, topic selection, personalised content setup, and contextual prompts that introduced value without overwhelming the user. The focus was on reducing friction and helping users reach a meaningful action quickly. I also mapped secondary onboarding flows designed to re-engage users after sign-up. These included reminder patterns, progress-based prompts, and content suggestions tailored to previous behaviour. Wireframing allowed ideas to be tested quickly with stakeholders, helping align teams around practical flows rather than abstract strategy. It also made it easier to identify where onboarding should feel lightweight, where guidance was needed, and where personalisation could add the most value. Through iteration, the direction moved away from static feature tours and toward simpler, more adaptive journeys that responded to user intent over time.
Outcome
The project helped shift internal thinking around onboarding from a tactical welcome flow to something with much greater strategic value. It created a clearer framework for how FT products could drive activation, repeat engagement, and long-term subscriber value. Compared with the previous onboarding journey, the proposed experience was designed to deliver stronger early engagement and clearer pathways to value. Based on benchmarking similar onboarding improvements and internal opportunity sizing, the new journey was expected to drive: +22% increase in first-week return visits +28% increase in activation milestone completion +31% increase in topic, newsletter, or preference setup +18% increase in content consumed during the first seven days -14% reduction in first 30-day churn risk +20% increase in discovery of high-value features such as audio, saved articles, and newsletters The biggest improvement was a shift away from a one-size-fits-all welcome flow toward a more personalised and progressive journey that encouraged users to return, build habits, and experience subscription value earlier.
