My Role

As the sole Product Designer of Pollfish, I led the initiative for designing the on-boarding experience for the platform for the Researcher persona. I conducted user interviews, mapped out user journeys and designed small progressive quick wins so that we could iteratively enhance the on-boarding experience.

I worked alongside a Product Manager, a Sales Manager and a Customer Support Manager.

The design solutions were launched globally in February 2017.

https://www.pollfish.com/signup/researcher

The Challenge

1. 1 - Reduce the number of new customers bouncing from the sign up page
2. 2 - Reduce the friction in the flow of creating a  survey for newly signed up customers
3. 3- Help customers understand that they successfully paid for a survey

Design Approach

Identifying the problem from data

As the sole Product Designer part of my responsibilities was monitoring our funnels and flows to see the overall conversion, activation and retention metrics. By observing our analytics MoM I saw that we had a broken funnel with a drop-off at key points in the user journey:

What I observed was that for our Researcher persona - one of the 2 core verticals of the platform - the drop off rate was massive even at their very beginning of their journey in using Pollfish. What was also alarming was the revenue generated by first time users.

Understanding the Researcher Persona  

Insights from customer support

I partnered with the Customer Support Manager to get insights from support tickets and find opportunities to invest in on-boarding based on current pain points.

In addition, I partnered with the Product Manager to craft a survey and get direct feedback from bounced customers. We focused both on the sign-up page and on the rest of the journey.

Launching the survey, 60% of bounced customers responded and of those, 10% agreed for a phone interview. Some of the most significant insights were:

1. “The sign up page doesn’t look trustworthy”
2. “I am a Researcher and I couldn’t find how to sign up”
3. “After sign up, I was left wondering in the dashboard”
4. “After I paid I was directed to a blank page and didn’t know what to do!”

Insights from customer support

I partnered with the Sales Manager to get a better understanding of how they approach potential customers.

I participated in 3 personalized demos in order to pick up details on the type of language and keywords the customers use in order to explain the product and also get an understanding on what customers are looking for when searching for platforms like Pollfish.

What I discovered was:

1. Customers would sign up in order to play around and discover whether they could target audiences by age, gender and other demographic criteria.
2. They were very interested in the different question types that we offered as well as the Screening Question logic that we use.

Takeaways

Ship and monitor the changes

Before progressing further in our on-boarding project we had to first evaluate our designs based on our hypotheses. We shipped our ideas and monitored the changes.

The biggest challenge through the whole project was to get the buy in for the concept of quick progressive wins rather than a big bang solution from key stakeholders such as the Product Manager and the CEO. I had to articulate very clearly and present a “road map” of milestones in order to make them feel comfortable with incremental solutions towards the end goal

Measuring the impact

After launching the new designs in February we monitored the changes for a month and saw an increase in most of our KPI’s. Since the launch ( February 2017), we saw a 3.8% increase in revenue MoM for the next 2 months which translates to ~18.000£ 🤑

1. The bounce rate from the sign-up page was reduced from 79% to 98% of users landing on that page and signing up.
2. From the 98% of new users who signed up, 92% created a new project and 43% of that completed the journey to check out (buy a survey).
3. We stopped getting support tickets from customers who paid for a survey that they don’t know what to do next.  
4. At that point, our data didn’t suggest that the Success Page was acting as a retention factor for our customers but rather helped them understand that their action has been processed from our end.  

Next Steps

Successful on-boarding takes constant iteration. For our first step, we focused on quick wins and on evaluating their impact. Since our experiment was successful our next steps will be focused on the rest of user journey:

I participated in 3 personalized demos in order to pick up details on the type of language and keywords the customers use in order to explain the product and also get an understanding on what customers are looking for when searching for platforms like Pollfish.

What I discovered was:

1. Plan and implement an email strategy to educate and support Pollfish users.
2. Tailor the on-boarding experience. Showing users a clear pathway to completion and establishing comfort with core features.
3. Utilizing the power of in-app messaging with tools like Intercom or Zendesk.