How We Doubled Indicate Signups

By Brandon Gadoci, February 5, 2014

As you might know, we are currently in the process of building Indicate, a tool to research, watch and receive email updates for companies you care about. It’s part of our overall strategy which will become a bit more transparent in 2014.

Taking inspiration from sites like Bloomberg and Morningstar, my initial idea for the home page was to focus the layout around all the different things that Indicate could do. The page launched about three months ago. Here is what it looked like.

We tried to highlight features by displaying them in context, rather then tell the users about them. These features were:

1. Watchlists
2. News, Milestones, & Analysts Snippets
3. Rising / Falling Star
4. Data & Graphs
5. Indicators
6. Portfolios

You can see how the page design follows each feature, and our perceived priority of it. In the 60 days or so that this design was live, the general feedback was that it looked good, but users weren’t sure what to do with all that information. They weren’t sure where to start.

I think the juxtaposition of financial-looking data and private companies was enough to cause a pause. Sites like Morningstar and Bloomberg benefit from an entire ecosystem of user experience support, and the metaphor wasn’t transferring.

Although the visual design we deployed was nice, it did little to suggest a workflow that would help users understand what we did best.

A couple of weeks ago, Fred started raising some of these same concerns, so naturally we turned to usage, but there was a hiccup there. Internally we were using the Watchlist feature heavily but user behavior told a different story. To us, researching, saving, and getting email summaries of changes was the most useful part of Indicate, but our users were primarily using the app to research companies.

Taking a chance, rather than redesign the home page to support what the users appeared to be doing the most, we made the bet that it was a messaging problem and tried to kill two birds with one stone; increase signups and usage of what we believed was our best feature.

What resulted was a very simple, clear message which showcased the Watchlist workflow. This is what it looks like now.

The user is presented with only three items in an ordered list format, so they know where to look first. Each item is supported by an image, communicating so much more with so much less.

Lastly (and perhaps most importantly) this approach gives us a much better chance at making Indicate a habit. Recently, my friend Ryan Hoover co-authored the book: Hooked — How to Build Habit Forming Products with Nir Eyal. In the book, they talk about the hooked model.

1. Trigger
2. Action
3. Investment
4. Variable Reward

This new design seems to be better positioned to fit into this model.

The result? The both doubled.

In the week immediately following the launch of the new home page we bested our previous weekly high for both signups and watchlist creation. In the two weeks following, we averaged that same previous high watermark in both categories.