Context

Leadership, including the CEO of Neighborly, wanted to make a stronger push to market the mobile app and saw it as a key lever for increasing customer demand. The IT organization—specifically Product and UX—was asked to identify ways to drive app downloads and improve engagement quickly.

Product leadership set an aggressive timeline: UX was expected to deliver designs within a month so they could be handed off to contractors. Given the scope and urgency, it was clear this would be a phased, iterative effort rather than a full redesign of the app.

Based on research, analytics, and known pain points, the team aligned on focusing the work where it would have the most immediate impact—the very beginning of the experience. This meant rethinking account creation, onboarding, and the homepage to better guide users, clarify value, and capture early signals of user intent.

Aligning on Direction

Given the tight timeline and other high-priority initiatives, I led an initial workshop with Product and Marketing to align on goals, constraints, and any existing marketing hypotheses around the mobile app. This ensured we weren’t designing in a vacuum before committing to solutions.

After that alignment, another UX Lead facilitated a Crazy 8’s workshop with UX and Product to collaboratively explore the experience direction. Concepts were grounded in both past and current research, which consistently showed users struggled to find expected services, the homepage had a high bounce rate, and overall retention was low.

These insights helped the team focus on clarifying service discovery and reducing early friction—setting a clear direction for the first phase of the mobile experience.

Account Creation & Onboarding

The app previously had no formal onboarding experience. We introduced a guided onboarding flow focused on increasing account creation while collecting key user intent. As an incentive, users who completed onboarding received a $20 service offer, framed as a reward rather than a requirement. Onboarding was optional—users could skip at any time—and the offer remained accessible on the homepage.

A new step asked users which services they were interested in. This data powered a personalized homepage that highlighted relevant services available in the user’s ZIP code, along with related upsell and cross-sell options. This allowed the experience to adapt based on user intent while creating clearer paths to engagement.

Reflection & Next Steps

This work was always intended to be phased. While the original plan targeted a broader rollout by the end of 2025, staffing changes ultimately reduced the team to a single engineer, which slowed execution and made timelines less predictable.

That said, the direction and designs are still moving forward. With limited engineering capacity, the focus has shifted to implementing and validating changes incrementally rather than launching everything at once. This reinforces the importance of the early decisions made in this project—prioritizing clarity, service discovery, and intent capture at the start of the experience.

As development continues, the next steps are centered on shipping in small, testable pieces, monitoring engagement and retention signals, and iterating based on real usage rather than assumptions. The goal remains the same: improve how users understand what’s available to them and make it easier to take meaningful action in the app, even if progress is slower than originally planned.