Sign Up Refresh

One of my favorite ways to quickly mock what changes to existing web pages will look like is to open up the Inspect Panel in my favorite browser and adjust the page using CSS and HTML changes. That’s what I did to quickly get my vision for the new layout of the signup process out into the world to gather feedback. The main decision that needed to be made was what content would be staying, what would be removed, and whether we wanted to add anything new. I chose to stay with the web version at this point knowing that any change made here will be reflected on our mobile app. 

I took a screenshot of each step of the process and put them into an InVision Freehand board to show to my team. From here I presented my vision to the design team, which consisted of 3 designers and our manager, the VP of product. As a group we went screen by screen, noting what text to change, what screens to remove or consolidate, and what new fields we needed to add to gather the right amount of information about new users.

On top of the content changes decided by the team to reduce steps and clicks, I added a few best practice pieces to the flow: 

• A prominent progress bar​.
• The brand’s logo at the top of each screen.
• Ability to easily switch between signing up and logging in.
• Clear directions on screen and improved error messaging.
• Consistent, large calls to action on each screen with a back button option​.
• Responsive design on the web so there was no longer a "mobile" looking layout on desktops.

On the web we removed 2 steps, and 3 steps in the mobile process. Steps were also rearranged to gather the most important data first, and additional information later.

The new experience for signing up and logging in brought consistency between web and mobile. Updates also matched user expectations based on common patterns and best practices used across all software sign up experiences. While this endeavor was primarily to improve the athlete experience, all other account types such as brands, teams, and fans benefited from these changes.

We met our first goal based on data we monitored over the following 90 days after release. Even though we added 2 more clicks to the flow, we still saw a slight decrease in completion time, an average of 15 seconds. We also had a higher conversion rate, an average of 10%. This image is a snapshot of that data, taken at the end of Q4 2021. We also met our goal to gather more consistent data on our users. Internal stakeholders shared what information was needed on athletes to help different teams, such as customer support and customer success, inside Opendorse be set up for success. This consistent set of information has helped keep them from hunting down what school an athlete attends or what sport they play. 

We did not meet the goal of creating less duplicate accounts, but that goal was later tackled in a claim account experience we added as an enhancement to the sign up flow (shown at the end of the video below). If there was one thing that I would have done differently with this work would be to run usability tests prior to building and releasing this new experience. It was something that our team didn’t make time to do, but is now a common practice in major changes or new features released to the product. It might have shed light to tweaks we made to the flow later on, such as requiring email and phone number and adding help text to a few fields.