Five studies across four years into why new users stalled at sign-up, and the redesign that finally acted on all of it.
DANA Onboarding Onboarding 2023 iOS & Android
View Prototype
Welcome
Phone
WhatsApp
OTP
PIN
Welcome backDANA onboarding is the first moment where new users decide whether the app feels useful, easy, and trustworthy. Earlier onboarding research showed that users generally understood DANA as a digital wallet for cashless payment, but 5 out of 6 users skipped the introduction and directly tapped the phone number field because they wanted to register quickly.
Users wanted to move fast but the journey still needed to feel clear and trustworthy.
A leaky funnel with no clear diagnosis. DANA was acquiring users but struggling to convert them. Registration completion was stagnant around 51%, and newly registered users weren’t activating the features that mattered.
Out of every 100 people who started registration
~51.3%completed, Aug to Oct 2023
The overall conversion rate for Aug to Oct 2023 hovered around 51.3% and was fluctuating downward. The team had no single clear cause: it could be OTP failures, UI confusion, or technical errors.
WhatsApp OTP was introduced as a security measure, but the Risk Team’s data showed users were still dropping off even after receiving the code. Users weren’t completing the step.
DANA had an extensive feature set, but newly registered users had no guided path to discover it. Users frequently said they didn’t know what to do after signing up.
Most of the time we’re too eager to ship a new feature rather than maintain or optimize existing features. DANA has too many features, but they’re not explored enough by users
Rather than a single research sprint, this was an evolving body of evidence: each study building on the last to progressively sharpen our understanding of the problem.
Unmoderated think-aloud sessions with 6 segmented users across age groups and digital wallet experience levels. Evaluated registration flow, tooltips, and what users did immediately after signing up.
One user thought the text was too long to read.
Average time on intro task: 136 seconds, most of it lost on confusion
Triangulated survey data, Appbot negative sentiment review, and internal analytics to identify the top causes of registration abandonment. OTP issues and obscure error messages emerged as the biggest culprits.
The 2023 desk research found that users who failed OTP verification were mainly users who did not receive OTP or experienced slow loading.
Internal data analysis tracking what users did immediately after registration vs. at 3 months vs. 6 months. Mapped acquiring use cases and fund use cases to reveal which features to surface first in onboarding.
At registration, A+ Rewards and Other GN dominate. By 3 to 6 months, Mobile Telco Standalone, Insurance, and QRIS take over. This mismatch means onboarding shows the wrong features.
P2P, PG, and Top Up remain stable #1 to #3 fund use cases throughout
CS team cold-called 186 users detected as having not completed WhatsApp OTP verification. Split between registered and unregistered users, this study pinpointed the exact failure modes in the OTP step.
The 2024 cold call research also found that OTP had the most challenges: users did not receive WhatsApp OTP, preferred SMS OTP, failed when entering OTP, or entered expired codes.
Drop off reasons: not received (38.5%), app error (23.1%), too slow (15.4%)
A meaningful share of users didn’t remember attempting to register: their phone number had previously been used by someone else or had been recycled by a telco provider.
Of unregistered users, 56 out of 79 said they had tried to register
A cross-functional Design Thinking workshop (PD, UED, Marketing, Tech) to align on problem statements, ideate solutions, and create a prioritized roadmap. Complemented by a survey on phone number registration behavior.
The vast majority of users register with the same number that’s on their device, validating the decision to build a phone number suggestion shortcut in the keyboard.
19% used a different number, mostly due to inactive SIM or owning two devices
E-wallets attract constant bot and fraud attempts, so a 100% registration success rate can mean risk controls are not catching enough. A rising success rate on its own is not proof of health.
Success rate alone does not measure registration health.
Each shipped screen below traces directly to the observation, decision, and tradeoff that shaped it.
Intro removed: one message, one action.
Phone restructured: Country and Number split, a suggested number, a clear control.
OTP rebuilt: WhatsApp confirmation, channel label, countdown, visible resend.
Details cut, arrival merged: Welcome to Welcome back in six steps.
The first decision was subtraction. The exploration below started wide (reachable phone input, richer illustrations, plain-language messaging) and kept removing until the third design. The comparison after it shows what “remove” meant in practice:
The first design iteration explored a structural shift: moving the phone input field below the carousel so it’s always reachable without completing the intro. Richer, more specific illustrations replaced the original abstract graphics. Messaging was rewritten in plain language based on exact user vocabulary from the usability sessions. The third design won by removing the most.
Mixed intent: promotional copy and a phone input on the same screen split user attention before trust was established.
One message, one action. Deferred feature discovery to post registration, where it’s actually relevant.
One of the clearest patterns in our research was that DANA had a tendency to introduce new features before the existing journey was fully resolved. The onboarding screen became a symptom of this: by the time users landed on it, they were already being sold a product they hadn’t yet decided to trust.
This informed the decision to strip the onboarding down to its core purpose. The current design removes the feature-selling layer entirely and replaces it with a single, clear value statement and one action. The reasoning is simple: a user who hasn’t registered yet doesn’t need product depth. They need enough confidence to take that first step. Everything else can wait.
OTP was the single largest friction point in registration: either the SMS was too slow or it never arrived at all. That pointed to a design question, not just a technical one: could a faster, more reliable delivery channel change how the whole verification step felt?
Entering any prefix other than “8” or “0” keeps the +62 country code
Entering “0” instead of “8” replaces +62 with 0 automatically
A merged +62/number field left users guessing about the correct format, a small friction that compounded into real drop off.
Structural separation of country code and number. Ambiguity resolved by layout, not copy.
The data told a story that wasn’t immediately obvious from looking at the screen: 81% of users registered using their own device’s phone number. That should have made this step frictionless. But it wasn’t, because the input field didn’t make it clear whether users should include or exclude the leading zero when typing after the +62 prefix.
The current design resolves this structurally: not with hint text, but by separating the country code into its own labelled field. The user now sees “Country” and “Number” as two distinct inputs, which implicitly communicates that the prefix is already handled. The addition of a clear (×) button addresses a secondary finding: on a numeric keyboard, mistyping is common, and users were abandoning rather than correcting.
No delivery channel stated, no time signal, and a buried resend action: three compounding uncertainties at the most critical step.
WhatsApp delivery stated upfront. Countdown timer as a trust signal. Always-visible resend link to prevent abandonment.
OTP was where we lost the most users, and it wasn’t because the concept was unfamiliar. It was because three separate problems were converging at the same moment in the journey: users didn’t know where the code was being sent, they couldn’t tell how long they had to enter it, and when it didn’t arrive, they didn’t know what to do next.
The current design addresses each of these individually. Explicitly stating “via WhatsApp” beneath the phone number sets the right expectation before the user even leaves the screen. The visible countdown timer (“00:09”) gives users a concrete signal that the system is working and tells them exactly when they can request another code. The always visible resend link (KIRIM ULANG) removes the moment of uncertainty that was causing users to abandon instead of retry.
The flow treats every screen as an opportunity to answer the question the previous one raised.
Welcome
Fixed: the introduction everyone skipped
The welcome screen earns trust before asking anything.
Phone
Fixed: guessing the +62 format
The phone input removes format ambiguity through structure rather than instructions.
Fixed: not knowing where the code went
The WhatsApp confirmation sets delivery expectations explicitly, so users know exactly where to look for their code.
OTP
Fixed: codes not arriving, app errors, slow delivery
The OTP screen restates those expectations and adds a countdown timer, converting a moment of silence into a visible signal that the system is working.
PIN
Kept: the step that protects the account
PIN creation reframes a security requirement as a personal action.
Welcome back
Fixed: not knowing what to do next
And the welcome screen closes the journey with a clear sense of arrival.
Every change above traces back to a specific drop-off point the five studies surfaced. This wasn’t a redesign for its own sake. It was a fix mapped directly to where the ~51.3% conversion baseline was leaking users.