My Role & Process

• Stakeholder Interviews - Gain understanding of business needs and customer/sales force expectations
• Remote User Testing - Create test script and observe users using the existing sign up to identify current pain points and areas for improvement
• Competitor Analysis - Study competitors' strengths, weaknesses, and strategies that create an advantage. Create user tests using competitor’s sign up flow for comparison of successful mechanisms
• Low-fidelity Wireframes & Mapping User Journeys
• Researching Social Sign Up Intricacies - Gain understanding the technical constraints of implementing social sign up mechanisms and compare their perceived benefits against the business’s values and customer expectations of privacy
• High Fidelity Mock Ups
• Moderated & Remote Usability Sessions
• Implementation - HTML, CSS, SaaS, SMACSS, Ruby on Rails

I was the project owner and responsible for the research, design, and implementation of this initiative.

I began by outlining the project goals and identifying the existing pain points during sign up and specific opportunities for improvement. To do this I interviewed several stakeholders and ran tests on our existing sign up page through the User Testing website.

One of the bigger opportunities I identified was implementing sign up via social media to allow ‘one-click’ registration. I spent time researching how social sign up would be implemented, and what implications it could have on our business. I saw many wins to having social sign up including faster sign up, not needing to create and remember a password, access to first party identity data which could be used to personalize user experiences, and more. However, when considering the business and its stance on privacy, many negatives came to light. I also considered that for a consistent experience, we would need to integrate social sign up across all of applications, some of which are desktop applications that we do not have the resources to frequently update. I ultimately took the stance that we should not implement social sign up. I outlined my findings and presented them to the designers, developers, and business heads and they were in agreement.

Despite not going for social sign up, I still made several meaningful improvements to the sign up page. I implemented a panel that displayed the sign up promotion and gave visual insight into the product and wrote it in a repurposable fashion so that it could take advantage of contextual user journeys and display information relative to how the user arrived at the page. I.e if the user came to the sign up page after looking at a photobook, the sign up page would display a photobook promotion. After the new sign up page was launched, we began to see a significant increase in user sign ups.

Takeways

During this project I learned a great deal about the importance of thorough vetting and research of new mechanisms. Despite identifying social sign up as a huge opportunity to increase user conversion, research and business considerations led me to believe it was not the right tool for FOREVER. Additionally, this project allowed me to refine my presentation skills as it was necessary for me to present and communicate with stakeholders throughout the business at multiple points in the project. Lastly, I this project gave me the opportunity to further some of my Ruby on Rails abilities. During the implementation portion of the work, I learned to write conditional methods with rails that allowed for contextual user journeys. This meant that the user would see content on the left-hand panel that was relevant to how they arrived at the sign up page, or whether they were assigned to an ambassador.