The U.S. News and World Report Education site allows users to create accounts to enhance their experience on the site. This is how my team improved the account sign-up experience, leading to a 40% increase in accounts created.
Objective
Revamp the Education account sign-up process to increase the number of accounts created and the profitability of each account.
Solution
A quiz format sign-up flow that adds delight to the account creation process, while allowing for the collection of more data points per user.
Team
Product Designer (Me), Product Owner, Developer
Tools
Sketch, Invision, Miro, Jira
Date
Nov 2021
The U.S. News Education vertical was transitioning to become an enrollment solution with the goal of connecting students with the right educational institutions and vice versa.
To make that transition, the product team wanted to understand each user and their goals to more effectively pair students with schools. This would allow for a more personalized experience for students, as well as improved quality of student data for schools to purchase.
Main objectives from the product team:
The product team prioritized account creation as the first step to get to know users and their goals, and thus wanted a revamped account sign-up experience. In our kickoff meeting, I gathered the main objectives for this redesign:
Increase number of accounts created (consequently, an increase in leads)
Know more about each user in order to provide a personalized experience and generate more valuable leads
Be transparent in our goal to connect users with schools in order to build trust with both parties
Education leads funnel. This project focused on the starred questions.
The Education site’s account creation process consists of two parts:
Authentication: Signing up with a generic U.S. News account - this is required to create an Education specific account.
Account Completion: Signing up for an Education specific account, during which a user fills out personal information.
Issues with the existing sign-up experience
While it would have been ideal to usability test this experience, we did not have the time and resources to do so. Regardless, design best practices and “designer’s intuition” were enough to reveal initial insights. Upon review and heuristic evaluation of the signup flow, these were the main issues found:
Going from Authentication to Account Completion was a disjointed experience - the visual styles did not match, and Authentication dropped users where they left off on the site, rather than redirecting users to the Account Completion step.
The checkout page format was not aligned with the user goal of creating an account - this format also didn’t leave room for adding more input fields, as the page would’ve become crowded and overwhelming to fill out.
To get more insight into common practices of sign-up processes, I looked at the sign-up experiences of competitors, and collected screenshots of the various flows in Miro for easy comparison.
Using my findings from the competitor analysis, and taking into account product requirements, I determined 3 main recommendations:
1 . Make the user flow actually flow
The competitor analysis revealed that in general, there are 3 main parts to a typical account creation flow: sign-up (with email), onboarding/info collection, and post sign-up. We had the pieces, but didn’t present them in a linear or cohesive way, causing a disjointed experience. I proposed connecting the dots.
2 . Visually match the Authentication and Account Completion processes
In the spirit of creating a more cohesive experience, I also wanted to make the visual design elements consistent between Authentication and Account Completion.
3 . Overhaul the Account Completion experience
In order to make our accounts valuable as leads, we needed to collect more information from users at sign up. That meant including more fields in Account Completion, and getting users to actually fill them out. The product team provided a long list of fields to include, so I suggested dividing them into multiple steps to reduce mental fatigue.
With help from the development team, we determined that customizing the Authentication step for the Education site would be unfeasible because it had to share implementation with the rest of the company. We decided that for now, simply redirecting users from Authentication straight to Account Completion would be a good compromise to streamline the signup process.
I pulled in the applicable components from our design system to create a first round of designs.
I received feedback from the product team to make the designs more fun and to possibly add a gamification element. One challenge of working at U.S. News is knowing how to balance fulfilling vertical-specific design needs while staying within the boundaries of the site’s global design guidelines, so I had to do some thinking…
After some digging, I found a few elements in our existing design system that I was able to combine, and created these more visually engaging mocks. The main updates were:
Added a light blue gradient background and playful icon imagery
Divided the questions across more screens so that no one screen would have too many fields
Shortened the questions, made them more prominent to simulate a quiz
Once these designs were approved, I set up a handoff meeting to explain the designs and functionality to the engineering team. I worked closely with developers throughout the development process, answering questions as they came up and doing multiple rounds of QA tests.
Within 1 month of launching, Education account signups increased by 40%! The whole team was surprised because users had to fill out nearly triple the number of fields, and yet signups were increasing. That just goes to show the power of a good user experience.
What I would do differently next time
Unfortunately, this project did not include user or usability testing outside of our internal team. For future projects, I would approach the early stages differently by advocating for research and being more proactive about creating a project roadmap for timing purposes.
Looking to the future
The Education vertical still has a ways to go to become the enrollment solution they strive to be, but this new sign-up process was a good start that allows for more opportunities to optimize the lead funnel.
