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I designed an auxiliary Sign Up with Google flow to increase account registration.

Product: MC Pro Duration: September — October 2023 Role: Lead Product Designer Responsibilities: analytics analysis and lightweight market research; user problem definition, solution discovery and product strategy; changes to user flow; high-fidelity UI documentation;

Background 📋

MC Pro is a subscription-based data and analysis product for primarily targeted to business intelligence professionals. Unlike its sister products in the Morning Consult product suite — which require going through a sales rep and entering into an enterprise contract — visitors can gain access to MC Pro by creating an account and selecting a subscription plan on the site. If and when a new visitor has exceeded the number of “free articles”, their access is blocked by a paywall. The paywall presents two calls to action: 1) subscribe for full access; or 2) create an account to continue reading the article you’re on.

Challenge / Business Problem

The MC Pro product was seeing a high number of first-time visitors. In fact, after launch, this number steadily increased month over month but we noticed that account creation wasn’t ticking up at the rate we’d expect. Site analytics indicated that the majority of users were abandoning the account registration process and even those that did follow through, it took an average of 10 minutes to complete. Aside from the obvious user acquisition problem, this also meant missing an opportunity to further nurture potential leads by not successfully capturing email addresses.

Solution

Adding an inline option to quickly create an account via Google Authentication that shortens the number of required steps and keeps readers in the flow of reading the article they’re viewing. This resulted in an increase of 30% new account registrations. I also streamlined our default ‘sign up with email’ option so that both options have more parity with one another and to keep current registration consistent.

<aside> 🏆 The new flow resulted in a net new increase of 30% in account registrations. Over 50% of all new accounts were created using the Sign Up with Google flow.

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My Role: Lead Product Designer

I worked closely with my Product Manager to collect the analytics data and build a report to summarizing our findings. We estimated the efficacy of implementing Sign In with Google and presented that solution as an experiment we wanted to run in our weekly planning meeting. I was directly responsible for creating new user flow diagrams, designing an updated UI, and presenting a Figma prototype to stakeholders for review. I was also responsible for handing off documentation to the engineer who would be implementing the feature.

Insights & Learnings 💡

<aside> 💡 Here are a few things I learned:

• Constraints can be re-thought with the right stakeholders (and the right context). During a design review with stakeholders, our Legal team asked that users still be required to manually agree to terms and conditions by displaying the terms language and checking a box before continuing. This threw a wrench in our proposed solution as it added the same number of steps Google SSO would remove, effectively undoing the advantage of implementing SSO. After this revelation, I set up meetings with the Legal team to understand and work through what, if any, flexibility we had when it came to users agreeing to terms. We discovered that the real risk had to do with users agreeing to terms related to subscribing and paying for services, which wasn’t pertinent to users just creating an account. I also showed them examples of competitors don’t ask users to check a box, but instead state clearly by continuing to create an account you agree to terms. All of this resulted in Legal better understanding our intentions and the user flows moved forward as planned. As an added bonus, it helped the Legal team identify redundancies in legalese could be eliminated and clarified for users.
• Intrusive messaging can help users avoid error states. I’m very cautious when it comes to banner notifications and other always-present UI patterns. I believe those patterns should be used intentionally and sparingly; too often are they used as bandaids for greater UX problems. In the context of this problem, we still needed to support users who want to sign up by providing an email address (i.e., not through Google). I initially advocated to grant these users access to an article straightaway, without requiring them to verify their email address. However, my engineering teammate identified an permissioning issue that would put users in a limbo state if and when they return to the site. The solution was to keep users on the article as intended but display a banner message at the top, informing them how to complete the account creation process. </aside>

Process

Visualize User Pain Points