How Creative UX Revolutionized Our Mobile Signup Conversion Rates
The importance of design is huge but it is even greater when it comes during the first stages of a startup company. This post addresses designers, product managers and developers as one. I will suggest an alternative approach to tackling problems using UX in order to create big impact on your venture.
Just to make things clear — this post is not about a specific product nor a specific technique. This post is about a way of life, a new way of thinking that we, at The Elegant Monkeys, are trying to adopt in every aspect of our startup life.
TL;DR —You should use UX to tackle problems and impact your startup.
The Challenge — Which signup method we should adopt?
When we built our first mobile application, Beenger, we thought deeply about what is the best signup method for us to adopt? Should it be using Facebook? Twitter? Email? Or perhaps all? I believe that many entrepreneurs faced this kind of decision.
Obviously, for each use-case there is a different answer and for us we decided to use Facebook signup only, so we added a FB sign up button to the center of the signup screen (see picture below). Why did we do that?
- We wanted to keep things simple (remember, it’s still a MVP).
- Less signup options = better chance that users will make the “right” choice for us.
- Connecting your personal Facebook account = an “investment” in Beenger.
- People who use Facebook to share moments will most likely feel attracted to Beenger.
- And of course, it gives us all the “colorful” details to create a personalized profile for our users right away.
TL;DR — We chose Facebook only.
The Result — Bad signup conversion rates
When we launched the product and users started to flow in, we wanted to see how many of them actually convert from a download to a registered user (Activation stage). We knew in advance that we are giving our users a big dilemma right at the beginning. Our signup method forced users to decide the following:
Should I connect my FB account? Or Should I quit (and probably delete this app right away)?
We believed that conversion rates will be 75%/25% in favor of choosing to connect the FB account.
Let me make it short — We were wrong. The conversion rates were terrible (less than 20%) and although people were very much interested in downloading our app, they weren’t convinced enough and chose to close the app instead of signing up.
TL;DR — Choosing Facebook only was a mistake in terms of conversions… but keep reading because now it gets interesting.
Don’t know the solution to your problem? Go ask others (Not…)
We had to go back to the beginning in order to find out what went wrong. So we went to take advice from many people in the industry — from designers, to UX specialists, product managers and CEOs of B2C mobile startups and more.
Everyone said the same thing — “you should add another signup method such as email signup or twitter, whatever you choose will probably make things work a little bit better”. The logic behind it was:
Signup option A vs. signup option B is much better than Signup option A vs. Delete the app
Hearing the same advice over and over again made us suspicious and eventually we decided to NOT listen to it. It is hard to tell you why we didn’t want to listen.
The rational excuse was that we didn’t want to make things complicated by adding another integration and we wanted the data that FB could provide us. However, in reality, it just felt wrong.
TL;DR — Everyone advised to add another integration but we decided to do something else.
Closing down on the right solution for us
We sat down to figure out a good solution for this problem. We wanted to increase the conversion rates dramatically with zero / almost not hassle. This is where the creative mind of the designer should come into the picture. After a few attempts we came up with this (See picture below)
Believe it or not, changing the signup component from a button to a slider made an immediate increase to our conversion rates from less than 20% to 55%-60% (!). We were amazed. A simple (and one might even say stupid) UX solution has made huge impact.
Looking backwards, we used a simple gesture that people were so used to do many times a day (basically each time they unlock their phone) in order to solve a totally different problem of bad conversion.
TL;DR — We changed from button to slider.
The Killer Solution is even simpler
We weren’t satisfied with this result we wanted more than 75% remember?). We thought to ourselves “if we could make such a big impact using such a simple solution, maybe we can improve it even more”.
After doing some user experience surveys and feedback sessions we found out that people didn’t get the “slider” UX and still thought that our slider is a button (so they tried to click it instead of sliding it for some strange reason).
Again, a small change in the text made a huge difference.
Changing the text line from “Continue with Facebook” to “Slide to Continue” also changed to conversion rates to more than 85% (!!!). Cool right?
TL;DR — We changed the text to make it super clear.
This is 10x UX. It is not about a single technique, but a state of mind. Feel free to reach out with questions in the comments below.
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For more posts by The Elegant Monkeys visit blog.elegantmonkeys.com
