I joined Automattic, the makers of WordPress, in 2014. During my tenure at the company I worked on numerous projects across several different teams. Most notably, I worked with the New User Experience (NUX) and User Onboarding teams to tackle improving our signup flow and our new user experience.
A modular signup flow architecture allowed us to quickly iterate towards the most performant signup experience.
My initial work on the User Onboarding and Growth team involved exploring ways to help increase activation, as many of our new users were abandoning the the signup process midway through. I recruited the help of our Growth Engineering teams to help re-build a signup flow that was modular and would lend itself to quickly re-arranging the steps of the flow. This would allow testing different configurations and quickly learning which sequence performed and which didn't.
The most performant signup flow placed the account details and account activation cta at the end of the flow.
Our current signup flow placed the account creation CTA at the beginning of the experience. Creating an account required little to no effort on the user's part. It was only after account creation that we began asking for further account and profile information.
Certain steps of the signup flow could be strategically removed or rearranged in order to improve overall activation.
I led an effort to redesign a signup flow that would place the account creation at the tail end of the signup flow, with account information, product details, plan selection, and domain name selection preceding the account creation CTA. I was asking our users to invest more time and information before creating their account. I hypothesized that a greater upfront investment in time would lead to a decrease in signup flow abandonment.
Privacy protection selection and domain contact info.
To help mitigate any potential information overload or option paralysis that a user might encounter during the signup flow, the domain registration contact information and payment details were presented to the user after they had activated their account but before they landed in their account dashboard.
Empty state dashboard for a new user.
My work on the signup flow resulted in a 19% decrease in flow abandonment and a 22% increase new account activations.