This is how I redesigned the sign-up process for meditation app Pausa, with the goal of increasing sign-ups rate. This was part of a larger project, where I also created an onboarding process after sign-up.
On average, only 67% of the users downloading Pausa end up signing up. Furthermore, only 55% of the users start listening to our 7-day meditation program, which we consider key to make them feel happy with Pausa and end up subscribing.
How could we drive more sign-ups and engagement so that they at least try out the meditation app?
I led the design process of building two separate but very linked features:
We believe that, altogether, this would allow users to have a better understanding about what they can expect to get and achieve by using Pausa.
What follows is how we created the sign-up process. If you want to see how we created the onboarding process, click here.
Our initial hypothesis was that it was just a “journey problem”. By cutting down the number of screens and improving the visuals, we could increase the percentage of users signing up. However, this didn´t work. Let´s see why.
Based on my initial hypothesis, user stories were written down to make sure that all the tasks could be accomplished seamlessly.
After that, user flows were created for all the high-priority tasks. The original flow was the one you can see below. Just by reducing one screen, we thought we could make a big difference.
“By reducing the number of screens to sign up and making visual adjustments, we´ll reduce the sign-up drop-off.” This was my initial hypothesis.
Below you can see where we thought the low hanging fruit was. If we could merge these two screens, then that would be enough (and we could continue with other projects). It was an agile approach aiming to solve a problem at a very low cost.
With this hypothesis in mind, I took the opportunity not only to reduce the number of screens, but also I created a slight change in our style.
I iterated with a few variantions, and to validate my suggestion to change colors, I ran a preference test.
“By reducing the number of screens to sign up and making visual adjustments, we´ll reduce the sign-up drop-off.”
But.... unfortunately this didn´t work. At least, we weren´t able to increase the sign-up rate. Then, what could be going on?
Unfortunately, this change didn´t work. Just reducing the number of screens didn´t increase the sign-up rate. And that made a lot of sense: Users would come to Pausa through paid ads, land to Google Play or the Apple store and then install the app. Or they would even just install the app right away. How likely would it be for someone to just sign up without even knowing what the dynamics of the app would be?
So we decided we had to understand better what our users valued, what our competition was doing and what changes we could make. Again, this was part of a broader sprint, but we were allowed to leverage on these initiatives to get very valuable information for this particular case.
We decided to invest time to research and have a better understanding about what we should be working on. On one hand, we analyzed the competition. On the other, we surveyed our users.
To start with, a member of the team carried out a competitive analysis focusing specifically on how other similar apps (Headspace, Calm, Mind Valley, Simple Habit, etc.) were onboarding their users, both pre and post sign-up. A larger competitive analysis was also conducted as part of our overall strategy redesign (see here).
The competive analysis ran made us become very aware that we were not telling any story. We needed to create one.
With not so much text, a lot of interactive animation showing different moments of everyday life, a very strong website and specially using key concepts (mind, love), Headspace encourages their users to sign up. The story is very simple, yet very powerful.
Calm even goes beyond. The hook here is to ask users what goals they want to achieve, right from the very beginning. As a user, there is no possibility I wouldn´t at least sign up. Fantastic idea.
We ran a survey targeting not only our existing Pausa users but also leads and students from our other property AnimaEdu. Our main objectives were to:
Unfortunately, some results and insights can´t be disclosed, but a good summary can be found below.
We surveyed very targeted existing and potential users. With this information, we were able to redefine our user stories, flows and content strategy.
With this new feedback coming directly from users, I then spent time reprioritizing user stories, modifying the flows and redefining the content strategy. That would allow me to create new visuals and launch a new version.
Thanks to the competitive analysis and survey conducted, we were able to add a new high-priority task: we realized that allowing users to understand more about what Pausa is about before signing up would help them take the decision to start. Thus, we decided to provide a series of messages right at the sign-up stage.
One of our team members took the lead to define what key messages we would be showing to our users, with two main goals in mind: a) To provide them with an overall understanding on how to use Pausa; b) To guide them to what we considered was the best way to start the journey with Pausa: Our 7-day program for beginners.
But even more important than that, we set up our app to be able to AB test between messages, so as to iterate and find the right hook.
This is the standard structure we came up with. With this, we would start iterating over the content collaboratively.
Not only we created our first series of messages, but we also deployed a tool to AB test between different content.
I received critical feedback by users. I redefined the journey, created the content and set up the tool to test the messaging. Now it was time to create the visuals.
We discussed internally and decided that at this stage we wouldn´t make any major change regarding colors. However, as we were aware of the fact that we would be placing much more text than in other screens, we explored the opportunity to use a white/light background instead of our classic light blue one.
With this in mind, I sketched different versions, experimenting with our primary and secondary colors. The main concept regarding the feeling we wanted to convey was calmness and pureness.
From a visual standpoint, and given that we would be adding way more text, we decided to go for the minimalist version (with a white background), instead of our current classic one.
Once the style was chosen, it was time to start playing with different variations. It ended up being an iterative process between the content that we were adding and the look and feel.
Below you can see how the finalized flows and screens looked like, as well as some iterations made throughout the process.
What you can see above is the final story we decided to launch with. What you can see below are some iterations I made throughout the process. We didn´t have resources for an illustrator, so I wanted to keep it simple, yet intuitive.
Although there has been a slight improvement in sign-ups already, the key achievement is that we were able to set up the machinery to AB test between messages.
Plus, there´s still a lot more we can work on this front! (see conclusions)
In these 3 weeks of intense work, we as a team had the opportunity to optimize key areas in Pausa. Not only did we start improving our sign-up flow, but also we set up the machinery to AB test and iteratively find the most appealing messaging for our users. There are a few lessons and also a lot more we can and are planning to do:
