The above screens represent the Lumosity.com subscription first run experience.
The good bits:
- Lumosity has planned on continuously onboarding users who may be in different situations, instead of focusing just on the first run experience. A new user who doesn’t choose to subscribe after their first session is still engaged in daily training, with education about the subscription service sprinkled throughout their free experience. Meanwhile, users who subscribe are also educated and engaged through onboarding techniques that introduce them to new training modes and the insights they can unlock with continued training.
- Although the user can learn about Lumosity’s product from the home page, Lumosity.com spends most of its time familiarizing new users through direct interaction with games. After a user signs up, they are immediately guided into their first training session, comprised of 3 handpicked games. Although Lumosity will sprinkle some information about its subscription service throughout this initial session, it waits to provide a large call to action until the user has completed this first section.
- Lumosity.com leverages gradual enhancement, expanding upon actions and the information it provides after certain milestones. For example, the first training session is tightly focused on completing 3 games, and its recap shows the potential growth areas the user can focus on. The second free session expands to show 5 games, 2 of which are locked until the user subscribes, and the recap focuses on providing information about the subscription service.
- Lumosity’s home screen dashboard is a great source of inline guidance, whether it’s pointing out new training modes or insights.
- Lumosity leverages proactive onboarding emails intelligently. The start off frequently engaging new users in daily training sessions, then taper off if those users demonstrate repeated engagement.
- The use of daily self-reflection surveys can increase user awareness and performance with their daily training sessions, according to information provided by Lumosity in 2015.
To be improved:
- Lumosity.com forces all new users to sign up before they can try any of the free games. This will likely push interested customers away (even if dedicated customers will stick around through required signup flows, others that also would have been valuable will be excluded). However, Lumosity seems comfortable with losing out on possible valuable customers, at least according to an article posted in 2015.
- Lumosity overuses overlays to educate users about new features. These overlays are not actionable and only repeat information already visible inline on the home dashboard. They often repeat features the user has already been introduced to before. Lumosity should either make these overlays more actionable, provide value beyond what’s already presented on the home dashboard, never show them more than once per feature, or get rid of them.
- The prompt to upgrade to a higher subscription level immediately after the user subscribes uses a dark pattern because it buries the action to continue without upgrading.