‍RoboKiller is a spam call blocking app built on award-winning technology that intercepts and stops robocalls before they reach your phone. Born out of the team behind TrapCall and TapeACall, the product won the FTC Robocall Challenge in 2015 and went on to protect millions of Americans from the estimated 190 million spam calls hitting US phones every day.Lumi joined from day one in 2016 to co-design the iOS app and help take it to market.  

The core challenge: the technology was powerful but the setup process was complex, varying by phone model, carrier, and OS version. Every point of friction cost users. RoboKiller needed a design partner who could make a technically complicated product feel effortless, then stay embedded through the growth phase to keep optimising acquisition, retention, and conversion as the user base scaled into the millions.

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The team established highly effective, data-driven processes to measure customer satisfaction, product improvements and growth. With each iteration, the product kept getting more functional, stable and better rated on the App Store. With product-market fit achieved, our focus shifted to empowering the growth team. The app was shipped quickly, so there was a lot of space for improvement. We focused on answering their questions on acquisition - how do we make the purchase decision as easy and effortless as possible for the users? And retention - how do we provide continuous value in what essentially was a 'set-and-forget' app?

As a result of close collaboration with the development, product and growth teams at Robokiller, we created a maximally simple, intuitive experience that allowed people to receive all the benefits of spam protection in just a matter of minutes.

We also designed an innovative feature called Answerbots. Robokiller's system intercepted and answered calls from spammers and then played custom pre-recorded messages to them. These could be anything, from a simple 'number disconnected' message to someone having a full-on family meltdown. Then the app recorded the spammer's reaction to the message - which was often so hilarious that the users kept coming back just to listen to it. We pushed for simplicity - letting the user know when they got a new recording, but not making a big deal of the feature until we knew we had a really good one for them.

That simplicity was exactly the source of success. The technology worked its magic in the background. The app didn't have a learning curve, there was nothing to remember. Users could simply enjoy a life without spam calls.

Our starting point for growing Robokiller was to address all the points of friction - places in the experience where users got stuck, lost interest, or left the product dissatisfied. With thousands of new users trying the product every day, we continuously ran tests and brought in improvements methodically. Working closely with the data and development team, we connected design elements with user actions, mapping out the whole experience. This gave a very strong case for investing in better design to empower growth.

Most people in North America experience spam calls every day. Which means literally everyone was in Robokiller’s demographic. Our focus quickly became about making the experience as straightforward, simple and joyful as possible to satisfy varying customers.

The key point of that was our user's first experience with the product - when they made the purchase decision and set up Robokiller protection. Making this process simpler and faster had a huge impact on the business, with individual tests resulting in up to a 10-20% improvement in conversions.