Targeting a new important segment, users with free accounts at the FT

Team

Dobromira Vasileva - Product Manager

Ludovic Robin - Tech Lead

Jordi Bueno - Engineer
Joe Singh - Engineer

Me - Product Designer

2021

Outcome

Testing saw an increase in registration rates by 12.9% and new multi step journey has been implemented

Process

  1. Understand

  2. Explore

  3. Test

  4. Iterate

UNDERSTAND

Context

Business opportunities

An expansion of the acquisition strategy: Acquiring more known readers could lead to more prospects we can target as part of wider acquisition initiatives (comment, save and share articles, etc).

Problem

We don’t have an account creation journey, leading to broken experiences and failing to meet user needs and/or expectations when trying to interact with our content.

Objective

Explore, design and test a sign up experience for free account creation to validate, measure and gauge interest.

Gathering requirements from the PM:

  • Working together to agree on timelines, deliverables and constraints

  • An opportunity to question our data governance, I needed to know what we do with the data we collect and why we’re collecting it.

  • Mapping the user journeys, how would our current experiences intersect?

Competitor audit

I started by seeking to understand how out competitors and comparators manage their registration experiences and observed:

  • Best UX practices

  • Utilising social credentials as a way to sign up

  • Purposeful moments of communicating value or benefits

  • Common UI experience of switching between sign in & sign up

  • Dynamic forms

EXPLORE

Early ideas & concepts

A few early concepts, a couple of crits and technical constraints later (goodbye auto-detect) we decided to focus on a ‘tab’ concept. We could reuse existing backend code for ‘sign in’, have a separate funnel for users looking to register and introduce steps to reduce cognitive load.

Introducing value prop and targeting consents

  • Addressing pain points from similar acquisition journeys and introduce clear value proposition copy to help users to understand ‘free access’ (something we could test and learn from later)

  • Enable targeting by adding marketing consents to the sign up journey

  • Add entry point to subscription flow

Scaling back & dependencies

The page that we intended to iterate on is owned by another team who only had he capacity to add an entry point to a registration journey.

So, what did we do?

  • Ditched the ‘tab’ concept to prevent two instances of the same form with different front end experiences and get reduce the dependency from another team.

  • Realigned on timeframe, expected deliverables and the changes in scope.

  • Found an old legacy form!

  • Added the entry point to the sign in page.

Splitting up the steps

Tech lead, product manager, user researcher and I agreed to follow a multi step experience as this approach yielded higher conversion rates on similar acquisition journey.

Key design iterations

Access landing: Exploring how to to best communicate the value of creating a free account.

Create account: Exploring UI patterns, updating the design system and managing technical constraints

Demographic data: Collecting data from users to increase their value to us whilst balancing user needs.

Confirmation page: Encourage engagement by introduce relevant content to users with free accounts.
(Previous test explored content bundles and I updated the UI patterns to include in our test.)

Getting feedback: Allowing effective comparison between paid vs free

TEST

Testing the new components

User insights from unmoderated tests on Usertesting.com

Research insights from second round of usability tests

ITERATE

Refining access landing

Following mobile first meant that I hadn’t yet thoroughly considered the desktop experience. When scaling up the lack of framing caused the content to feel “floaty”. Working with the grid to create cards resolved this UI issue quickly.

VALIDATE

A | B TEST

Primary metrics:

  • Registration form completion rates;

  • new registered users with demographic data (control vs variant)

Secondary metrics

  • Drop of rates at each step of the variant

  • Consent opt ins

Key results

# 1
Registration rates increased by 12.9%, but self declared demographic data dropped with only 3% sharing this information.

# 2
Higher % of consents via multi step, creating a pool of users who are of higher value to us.

# 3
More users choosing to take a full subscription through the multi step journey

NEXT STEPS

Embedding personalisation

Work more closely with B2C Marketing team and other senior stakeholders to consider how we might optimise the retention and engagement during the account creation journey.

Initial explorations:

Varying goals of anonymous users?

Looking at the data

Biggest drop-off is on the access screen with 45.6% continuing to create account step. Can we condense the access landing into the create account step to increase the number of users with different motivations to move forward in the funnel?

Reflections

Important lessons learned:

  • Test earlier, be messier & more decisive.The speed and duration of this project took pressure off the team to make decisions quickly. But could we have learned the same thing in a faster with smaller output? How can team members align on levels of risk?

  • Assume nothing and visualise your questions. Having visual references make alignment much easier and enable more feedback loops.

  • Data can help inform our decisions, but being wary of its quality and how results are presented to stakeholders.

How I would approach the same task:

  • Get closer to business strategy & stakeholders. Gaining stronger business empathy by finding the reasons behind a project and the teams that define them, building relationships to be able to explore problems collaboratively.