Client Background

The software company makes it easy for service providers to schedule their work and receive payment. The company helps a wide variety of use cases, from event planners to home contractors, and has a flexible and usable product that customers love. The website provides education on the use cases and the ability to create a free account.

The Challenge

The company generated high levels of interest from social media and advertising campaigns. Prospective customers understood the targeted messages, but only a small portion of visitors created a free account on the company’s site. Even fewer visitors would complete the onboarding steps and start collaborating with their own customers. The software company aimed to increase both the number of visitors creating an account and those fully onboarding to interact with their own clients.

Our Strategy

We began with a site experience audit. This included a detailed analysis of the customer journey through the marketing and onboarding process. As a result, we identified many small fixes to make prior to user testing and specific questions we wanted to answer with target customer research.

After the learnings initial fixes were implemented from the site experience audit, we took an iterative design and usability testing approach. In collaboration with the company’s designer, the Experiment Zone user research team created a usability study we would run on a weekly basis on the latest version of the marketing and onboarding flows. In each study, we’d identify the opportunities to improve the user experience based on the pain points and confusion that surfaced in the study.

The Results

The weekly iterative studies ran across four months. In each study, we refined the recruiting criteria as we learned more about the target audience - and we improved the design of the onboarding user experience. This was measured in a pre/post analysis, reviewing the conversion rate of visitors that signed up for a free trial or completed the onboarding experience.

By iteratively testing a prototype, we were able to significantly decrease development costs for the software company so that they only had to build the final version of the improved customer journey.

After this significant change in the onboarding flow, we turned our focus to measurement and optimization testing.