Helping new readers get started
At the Financial Times, I looked at how onboarding could help new subscribers find their feet and build a reading habit.
People were signing up and downloading the app, but fewer than expected were becoming regular readers. I wanted to understand what was getting in the way during those first few sessions.
My part in the project
I led discovery and set the design direction. I brought together existing user research, competitor reviews and workshops with teams across the FT, then turned that work into an onboarding model and early wireframes.
Finding the gaps
I reviewed interviews with readers and prospects to understand why they subscribed and what they expected. People had clear reasons for joining, from keeping up with their industry to understanding finance and world events. Knowing where to start was less clear.
For occasional readers, the amount of content could feel overwhelming. They wanted help finding stories that mattered to them and expected the app to offer some direction from the start.
I also ran sessions with subscriber engagement, customer care, marketing, B2B, FT Edit and growth teams. Each had a different view of onboarding. Some focused on sign-up and first-session actions, while others looked at reading frequency or support issues. We needed a clearer shared view of what a good start looked like.
Giving people a reason to return
The useful moment was different for each reader. It might be finding relevant market coverage, choosing a newsletter or discovering something worth reading every morning. That made it hard for a single welcome flow to do the whole job.
I developed a model with three stages:
Activation: help someone find useful content and a clear next step.
Habit formation: help them pick up where they left off and build reading into their routine.
Expansion: introduce more of the FT, including audio, newsletters and personalisation, as their use grows.
Working through the journeys
I explored topic selection, personalised content setup and prompts that appeared when they were relevant. I also looked at what could happen after the first visit, including reminders and content suggestions based on reading behaviour.
The wireframes gave teams something concrete to discuss. They helped us work through where guidance was useful, where it became too much, and what could wait until later.
The proposed direction
The approach spread onboarding across the first few sessions, with guidance shaped by a reader's interests and reason for subscribing. Email and push notifications were part of that journey too.
The output was an onboarding model and a set of early concepts for teams to build on. The aim was to help readers find value sooner and return more often. The projected improvements were expectations, rather than measured results from a launch.
What I took from it
The most useful part was getting different teams to look at the same reader journey together. It made the gaps between sign-up, the app and follow-up messages much easier to see, and gave the design work a clearer starting point.
