Babbel Onboarding Flow Improvement

Continuous discovery on Babbel's Visit-to-Sales funnel, focused on helping new users move from first visit to paid subscription.

On Babbel's Growth team, I worked on the Visit-to-Sales onboarding flow, the path from a user's first visit to subscription. The goal was to understand why people dropped off during onboarding and design a more relevant path that helped more users finish and subscribe.

Onboarding is where Babbel wins or loses a user. People arrive curious, then meet a generic flow that treats everyone the same. Many leave before they subscribe.

The funnel showed where people dropped, but not why. It had no read on what someone wanted, how fast they wanted to learn, or what they were learning for.

The challenge was simple to say and hard to design. Learn what each person needs early enough to act on it, without adding friction.

15+ user interviews

Regular discovery workshops with product, design, and engineering

November 2022 – March 2023

Two opportunities came out of the interviews.

I focused on personalization first, since the strongest signal was people wanting learning that fit their life.

Travel was the clearest motivation, so we tested it first. But travel means different things. Sipping cocktails on a beach is not hitchhiking with a backpack.

The questions we already asked were thin: what language, and how familiar are you with it. The questions worth asking went deeper: when do you travel, where, with whom, for how long, and what will you do there. Those answers are what personalization actually needs.

New questions for personalization. Travelers kept naming specific plans and dates. Someone leaving in a few weeks wanted a faster, more intense start. So the new flow asks four things that matter: what language, how familiar you are, when you are traveling, and what you will do there.

We also dropped the "how much time can you give" question. We generate that from the answers instead of asking, which removes a step. And we added a learning method question, app only, live teacher, or both, to shape the path.

Regular flow

I designed the new flow end to end: Motivation, Timeline, Activity, Past experience, and Learning Method. Each screen turns one insight into a single clear question, so the app learns the person while they move forward.

We ran the travel personalization experiment for one month against the standard flow. The experiment showed that asking the right questions early and using those answers to personalize the flow helped more users complete onboarding and subscribe.