Insightly Sign-Up Redesign
Summary
Increase the sign-up rate to Insightly’s CRM platform.
Constraints:
6 week project length
Removing marketing and sales fields in the signup flow was initially off-limits
My Role
Lead designer. Responsibilities included:
Running user research, interaction design and prototyping, visual design, and testing/validation
Design review sessions with UX Manager and Content Manager
Constant communication with VP of Sales and VP of marketing to ensure business needs were met, and for design validation
Working with web developer to clarify design questions, and helping to QA
Internal deep dive
I began by conducting an audit of existing functionality, including:
Mapping the existing flow
Cataloging all screens, including errors, and edge cases
Finding key drop-off points
Research
External Audit
I conducted an external audit of competitors and relevant app designs. This helped ensure a thorough understanding of the problem space as I moved into more specific research.
The Fogg Model
The fundamental challenge in this flow is straightforward: gather user info and complete a signup. The first step was to find out the levers that increase user signup. To do so, I centered my following research around the Fogg model.
The Fogg Behavioral Model shows that three elements must converge at one moment for a behavior to occur. They are: Motivation, Ability, and a Trigger.
I.e. If you want someone to do something: motivate them, enable them, and give them the opportunity to act.
With the support of my design manager, I proceeded to conduct a series of user experiments to understand the following factors:
1. User motivations for adopting a CRM
2. How to improve ability (usability)
3. What are the right calls to action?
Motivation
To begin, I focused on motivation. I contacted a cohort of users who signed up and are regular users, and surveyed them about what was important during the CRM buying experience. I captured their responses in a spreadsheet which became a foundation of our MVP messaging. They were then bucketed into two categories.
Profit or Gain: e.g.s: Save money, make money, more sales, more productive, more time
Efficiency and Lower Risk: e.g.s: Protection, relief from pain, less work, security; safety; no worries, automatic
Usability and Perceived Ability
Next I focused on the factor of ability. We began by analyizing our UX in metrics that are correlated with perceived difficulty by users.
A factor that is strongly correlated with perceived difficulty is the number of pages in a process. As compared to the competitors, Insightly had the 2nd longest self serve signup flow by page count at 7 pages, only behind Salesforce IQ.
The high number of pages was not because we were breaking up the process into small bits. Insightly also had the 2nd longest sign up flow by field count, with 16 interactions to sign up. In contrast, some competitors took 4 interactions to make an account. These numbers and visual aids assisted in convincing the sales and marketing teams that we may need to make some changes in the information we request and when we request i, if we want to be within user expectations.
Much of the friction was not merely perceived friction. Poor UX practices (low hanging fruit) also made it difficult to complete the process. Some examples include:
Lack of clarity, improperly used UI elements (e.g. long lists with no search functionality)
Email verification early during sign-up
Asking too much, too early: phone number request on first page, for a company that most users have no relationship with
Explorations
All of the relevant data from the research step was analyzed and distilled into stories by myself, the UX Manager, and the VP or Product. Then, I proceeded to explore a multitude of solutions to each story. First I focused on the information breakdown between sections (what to show and when?), and subsequently on finding the right balance of ability and motivation on each page.
The process began with broad explorations which were iterated on and refined until the team agreed that we had user-read screens.
Final Design
In the final redesigned flow, account creation was reduced to 5 pages, from the original 7. Sections were rearranged into smaller blocks that were quicker to consume.
Based on our prototype results, we decided to focus on fewer information requests up front. In addition, we incorporated trust/encouraging messaging, albeit with a subtle visual footprint, so as to not distract from the form.
This layout resulted in the quickest completion time, with the users noticing the trust content, but not overspending time on it.
On the biggest drop-off point, the check email step, we included a call to action to reintroduce momentum, a “didn’t receive email” button to prevent drop-offs from email-related errors, and we doubled down on the trust element with a social proof quote. This again was given a subdued treatment, in order to avoid introducing a new element of friction via distraction. These changes may seem minor, but the lack of affordance on this original page made it easy to miss, and contribute to what was the highest drop-off point.
The organizational and marketing information was required in order to build and execute sales and marketing strategies. Thus, this information was still requested, but it was done so within the app via an overlay/modal. My hypothesis was that giving a peek of the app in the background would give users additional motivation, as they were so close they could “see it”. Thus, users would feel that they are done signing up, and now fully invested into “onboarding” mode.
To ensure that there were no avoidable drop-offs related to incompatible devices, we utilized a responsive framework and tested on dozens of our users’ most commonly used devices.
Conclusions & Iterations
15% overall increase in sign-up conversion
30% decrease in drop-off at email verification step
Future Iterations:
Understand user needs and motives at a more granular level
Messaging and imagery specific to user segments
Experiment with no email verification (remains greatest drop-off point). This is difficult because it can product spam accounts or poor leads that may not be good for the business.
Focus on more qualified sign-ups (Speak specifically to users more likely to sign-up and stay)
Focus on transition to onboarding
Which first-tasks are most associated with retention?
Experiment with different onboarding modules and eventually create targeted onboarding