ThinkOnward Registration Flow
I increased conversions by simplifying registration and using strategic prompts.
COMPANY
ThinkOnward
June 2024 - July 2024
SCOPE
IA, flow, and some design
TOOLS
FullStory, Jira, Confluence, Grain, Figma, Auth0 Documentation
CONTRIBUTION
Lead Designer - I took business directives and handled all strategy and design.
PLATFORM
Native iOS app
CONTEXT
The current registration flow was fairly extensive to help tailor the overall experience and understand the users. Users were well informed of what they were signing up for so the drop off rate was under 20%.
However, business objectives changed and leadership required us to increase our user base of skilled Geoscientists and Datascientists. They wanted build a larger network of the highly sought after professionals that used the platform on a regular basis.When the marketing team kicked off a new ad campaign driving a thousand new users daily, that drop off rate climbed to 48% so I wanted to make some big changes.
7
The number of pages (not including the email) within the user registration flow.
245
The number of seconds it takes to register NOT including waiting for the verification email.
41%
The percentage of users who abandoned the registration process.
700+
Potential daily users lost.
Research and Planning
Most of my projects require quite a bit of user research, but in this case I spoke to just a few new users, as well as learning the capabilities of Auth0 (our authentication platform) and talking to our stakeholders about the user data that we were currently collecting during registration.
USER INTERVIEWS
I was able to speak directly with 6 new users about the registration process. All users said the registration process was too long (one person had to quit and come back later) but they continued because they already knew they wanted to compete in a challenge.
Auth0
It’s not my favorite authentication platform but I was delighted to find that they offered a password-less option. And before you ask, yes i would have loved to implement Google/Facebook account registration but due to highly sensitive data being used on the platform as well as other legal issues, that was not an option. :(
THE SHIFT
I had a few conversation with the stakeholders about their objectives and how to prevent them from interfering with the bigger picture objectives. I really enjoy this part of the process. I find that most people just want to be heard and feel that they are part of the process.
After some discussion and diagramming I was able to negotiate some changes to how and when we prompt our users for their details as well as the 2FA.
User Testing and Takeaways
I perform hallway style testing in-house to both stress test the prototype and get a bit of feedback. The positive feedback was encouraging and I was ready to move forward.
I reached back out to the same 6 users to show them what we had done. I used Figma prototypes and Grain AI notetaker to document the whole process. We got some great feedback and only needed to make few tweaks to the copy to clear some things up.
Final Designs
Registration flow - Enter Email, OTP, T&Cs, and Dashboard
Alternative flows - Challenge page, Profile Information request, and 2FA setup
New flow - LinkedIn profile, AI biography writer, and biography review
The Impact
WHAT I LEARNED
Personally, this was a pretty straight forward UX journey. There was some low hanging fruit that would make significant impact on new user registration. What came more into play was “soft skill” of working with stakeholders and negotiating the entire experience.
NEXT STEPS
The number one business objective was to increase our user base but that isn’t worth much unless we knew how to utilize their talents. That meant we still needed to learn more about them in a way that was unobtrusive and simple. The linkedin AI biography writer had some great successes so the next step will be to incorporate additional steps using AI to help users complete their profiles.
Q3
Goal: 20% conversion rate
Recorded: 22% (from 48%)
Q4
Goal: 20% conversion rate
Recorded: 19%