The good bits
- The app starts with a friendly introduction and an immediate personal focus by asking the new user for their name.
- Mona embraces the concept of the free sample, not forcing a new user to sign up. The new user can begin creating “Missions” (saved searches that allow the assistant to find related items), create a size profile, and start giving the assistant feedback, all without being forced to create an account first.
- The new user can permit Mona to learn about them implicitly by linking Mona to their email account and parsing receipts from their email.
- After the new user completes the introductory wizard, they are greeted on a home screen that is already populated with sample mission content and a clear next step to “add your size for improved fits.”
- The app uses a user-guided tutorial, showing one-time hints to the new user as they navigate through mission cards and products. These tips guide the new user to particularly interesting products or features. The hints are spaced out enough to avoid being annoying, but frequent enough to establish a reliable cadence and set expectations that this is the primary way Mona will communicate key finds to the user.
- The app continues maintaining a personal focus, learning more and more about the new user by eliciting feedback as they favorite or dislike items. If a user dislikes an item, they are asked “What did you dislike?” and can select “Price,” “Style,” “Brand,” and “Color,” or they can leave more detailed feedback. Users can also provide feedback on overall search results. This puts the user in control and reinforces to them that Mona is constantly in learning mode.
- When a new user decides to create their first mission, they do not need to create one from scratch. Mona uses actionable inline cues to avoid an empty state, giving the new user an option to select from popular missions or change a popular mission to their own criteria.
- The messaging on the app home screen is dynamic, evolving over time to reflect the new user’s continued engagement with the product.
To be improved
- The new user is greeted with an iOS system notification access prompt immediately on app launch. No justification is provided as to how this will be beneficial to the new user. The app should consider deferring the prompt until after a new user has gotten a chance to favorite items or create missions, which are optimal times to point out that Mona can provide notifications about new matches or price cuts.
- While the user-guided tutorial hints are generally well done, some are triggered by scrolling, which means occasionally they disappear and reappear if you scroll too far past their trigger point. The app should not dismiss a hint due to scrolling until it has been fully scrolled off screen first.
- While the first-run introductory flow begins with a personal focus (“What would you like to be called?”) it immediately pivots to a passive “Let me tell you about myself” slideshow. The first two slides of the slideshow are not interactive, so the user likely will skip through quickly. Although the last slide has a critical action on it (the ability for the user to link Mona to their email account), it could easily be missed by a user who assumes it is like the previous, non-interactive slides.
- Asking the new user for a specific gender to shop from as a key setup step is not ideal for today’s array of gender identities.
- When a user dislikes items, the “What did you dislike?” options only stay on screen for 3 seconds before automatically dismissing, not long enough for a user to read and tap on one of the 5 options.
- In the Profile section, none of the empty states are compelling. Most just say, “You have no favorites/orders/missions. The only section that gives the new user a chance to do something or create content is in “Settings,” and it’s just a prompt to create an account, with no accompanying value proposition statement.