Redesigning user on-boarding flow

The following is a summary of the steps we took to revamp the sign-up flow. For a more elaborated article, please refer to this post: Iterating on the sign-up flow

Figures and company name in this post has been edited due to the sensitivity of information presented.

One of the first few things we iterated on when we started working on growth was the sign-up flow.

Before

1. Go to homepage to download our software
2. Install and run the software
3. Create a new account
4. Log in to an empty address book
5. Figure out who are using the product and how to add them

We suspect that a large group of our users would have dropped off by the second step, and there was no way for us to know, or to contact them to figure out why. We didn’t know our conversion ratios, and we couldn’t figure out if the people downloading our software were new users or existing users.

Revamping the sign-up flow meant re-strategizing on how we could optimize our signup flow, channelling our new signups through a funnel to ensure that they end up as successful users.

Learning from the competitors

We studied the signup flow of competing and complementary products. We mimicked Hall’s simple and clean signup flow, as well as LinkedIn’s email designs.

The new flow

1. Email signup on landing page for organic signups (Green “Free Sign Up” call to action button because Green supposedly converts best, according to 5 Learning Points from Udemy’s Growth Hacking course)

2a. Receive email verification in inbox to complete profile/ create account (Yellow call to action button which was ripped off LinkedIn’s email invite design)

2b. For users who were invited to the service, accepting an email invitation was equivalent to completing the signup/ verifying their email address. Hence, users will not need to re-enter their email address to sign up for a new account

3. At the account creation page, the standard email address is prefilled as the login username since it has been verified.

4a. If the user is detected to be using either gmail, yahoo or live mail, they will automatically be prompted to “find friends” who are already users by importing their address book.

4b. A list of friend recommendations is generated and sorted based on frequency of contact, and a minimum of 3 friends were needed to move to the next step.

5. For the users who denied import, did not have any contacts to import, or did not select any contact to add/ invite, they will be redirected to a manual invite page and encouraged to invite at least 1 teammate.

6. The browser automatically detects the operating system of the computer and download the respective versions.

Results

About 70% of signups eventually get to the download page with a non-empty address book.

For a more elaborated article, including our learnings and revisions, please refer to this post: Iterating on the sign-up flow