14 Product Lessons From Noom’s Online Quiz

Many DTC and non-DTC companies are adopting “online quizzes” as a way to bring new visitors into their funnel, recommend the right products, and ultimately convert them into customers.

We’re starting to see this across many companies, such as Curology, Murad, hims & hers, and more.

These online quizzes are a great way to gather information on your customers, provide them with a unique buying experience, and make them feel like cared for. However, with lengthy quizzes comes a lot of user fatigue.

So a while back, I did a product analysis on Noom because they’re one of the best at it in terms of yielding the best completions and conversions from their quiz. From new landing visitors to paid customers.

For those unfamiliar, Noom is a weight-loss app on your phone that helps you track your weight, monitor what you eat, and connect with like-minded people in your same situation.

Here’s what I learned 👇

1. Don’t ask for information right up front (such as email, #, etc). Provide value first and get the user engaged/invested, then ask for information with the lowest amount of friction possible, in order to continue having touch-points with them if they bounce/haven’t converted.
2. Make it extremely easy for a user to make a decision. Only give them one option and make it as easy as possible for them to click that one option. (Big button, high contrast colour, etc.)
3. Make transitions as quick and seamless as possible throughout the quiz. One tap, and onto the next. No animations to slow down experience. It pays off in a long quiz/survey.
4. Make buttons big, for easy tapping and progression, and make text as easy to read as possible.
5. Social proof is key! People need others they trust to convince them.
6. Don’t provide exit options to the user. Make it really hard for them to leave the quiz.
7. To make results feel more custom and users to feel the reward for their time spent, create the illusion that you’re working “hard” to craft the right results that fit them the best by not giving them the answers right away. For example, calculation/progress bars that take 5–10 seconds to complete are a good method here. During “calculating” periods, prompt another question mid-way calculation to continue making it feel custom.
8. Provide images/infographics along the way that add educational value to the user, but don’t slow down the quiz progression.
9. Remind the user why they embarked on the quiz in the first place. Show them their desired goal and reinforce in their head that by completing the quiz they will be able to achieve their goal.
10. If asking for payment, sometimes asking the user what they’d like to pay pays off. Don’t give payment options below the minimum amount you want to make. By offering higher potential payment options you can make more margin and make the user feel more invested in the journey.
11. Telling a user upfront of a risk-free trial, and then at the end only giving them the “free” trial if they pay, is a sneaky tactic but helps users actually complete the quiz. If they were honest upfront, many users probably wouldn’t have taken the quiz.
12. When trying to convert a user to pay for a product, an expiring timer to purchase (e.g. a 15 minute timer) creates some pressure & scarcity on your product and may lead to a higher conversion rate. Especially if a user just completed a very long quiz, letting an offer expire and needing to do the quiz all over again will likely help the user convert more.
13. If most of the traffic to your website is coming from ads, it’s even more important to reduce the bounce rate, keep the user engaged, and at least get the user to a point where they can give some initial piece of information which can help you retarget or follow up later. Ads cost money! The Noom site has little SEO presence since it’s just a landing page. All the value is behind an auth wall, so they need to rely on ads for traffic. This is likely why they don’t force auth pre-quiz on the web, since it’s a high friction point and they want to optimize for obtaining emails.
14. With a mobile app, a user has to download it first. When they download an app, they’ve already invested time and effort and mindfulness to give the app a try. That’s why Noom likely forces auth pre-quiz on the mobile app instead of the web app.

That's it! 👋

If you have any questions or want to connect, feel free to send me a message through Twitter: www.twitter.com/ZainManji or email us at founders@lazertechnologies.com 👋