New Home Screen for Customers

RIO is a comprehensive logistics platform offering a wide range of digital services and solutions catering to fleet managers, carriers, shippers, and vehicle rental services. While they provide substantial value, empirical data reveals that many customers exhibit limited engagement after their initial registration. Typically, new users are greeted by an overly generic home screen featuring informative updates for power users alongside marketing banners. Essentially, this home screen displays identical information daily for every user, devoid of interactivity and a clear starting point. From a technical standpoint, marketing personnel maintain the content, which is embedded in a React Single Page Application (SPA).

This situation is attributed in part to RIO's product-centric organizational structure, where most individuals have a distinct focus on various RIO services rather than considering the platform holistically from a user's perspective. Additionally, proposed changes to the home screen have often been disregarded due to the complexities of supporting multiple languages and concerns about potentially worsening the user experience for certain segments.

In collaboration with RIO colleagues, we embarked on a mission to address this challenge. We set a clear objective: "To enhance user engagement among new registrants by offering step-by-step introductions instead of the current generic homepage." Our immediate focus was on conceptualizing the appearance of this new landing page. We adopted a use-case-centric, step-by-step approach to guide new users through essential initial steps and enable them to express their preferences for further exploration. This approach not only allowed for iterative optimization based on real user feedback but also deepened our understanding of the fundamental needs of customers who had just chosen to use RIO, likely with specific goals in mind.

To expedite the launch of this experiment while keeping efforts reasonable, we implemented practical shortcuts. The new home screen was exclusively shown to users who had registered within the last 14 days, and we limited consideration to German-speaking customers to avoid internationalization complexities. Rather than integrating CMS content, we hardcoded all elements into our React App. These strategies streamlined our focus on testing the hypothesis and minimized coordination efforts with stakeholders. We stored relevant state information in cookies to avoid a costly backend for our MVP (Minimum Viable Product). In the pursuit of swift initial results, we deliberately bypassed some engineering best practices, such as comprehensive test automation, adhering to the principle that "done is better than perfect." In essence, we adopted a "customer-first, tech-second" approach to ensure we understood what to build before investing in a robust implementation. The one non-negotiable aspect was comprehensive user tracking, a crucial element for experimentation.

For result analysis, we judiciously selected tools tailored to each question and combined data from various sources (Google Analytics, Salesforce CRM, AWS Quicksight). These sources had been recently maintained and used by different teams, often lacking a global perspective.

In just one week, we transitioned from a broad problem statement to a concrete experimental concept. A mere week later, the new home screen went live. While the collection of real customer data over the following two weeks couldn't be expedited, one additional week proved sufficient to analyze, visualize, generate insights, and recommend next steps. In sum, this lean product development cycle encompassed 5 weeks, with 3 weeks dedicated to active work – an impressive ideation-to-insights timeline. Such speed was only achievable through collaborative efforts with a select group of key individuals across different teams. We chose to showcase tangible results rather than discuss plans at an early stage, allowing us to gather feedback from a broader audience – and the feedback we received was exceedingly positive.

Our initial hypothesis, suggesting an increase in user engagement among new registrants with step-by-step introductions, was ultimately rejected as there was no significant difference in user engagement during the first week on the platform. Nevertheless, our data underscored our ability to guide users, with almost half of them completing their onboarding during their initial visit. Consequently, we succeeded in boosting the proportion of new accounts that activated at least one vehicle on their first day, enabling them to explore other services.