Case study: BabyCenter registration Flow

Project overview:

The BabyCenter app is a pregnancy tracker that guides users through the countdown to their baby’s due date. It offers weekly baby growth tracking and provides fetal development videos for each stage of pregnancy.

Registration is a sensitive area. Any changes we make, even as small as a copy change, requires A/B testing before rollout.

The following shows the process we came to adapt the successful design.

Our app experience is reg gated. The project is based on iOS platform.

Business goals & KPIs

Maintain or improve conversion rate.

My roles and responsibilities

I was the lead UX and UI designer on this project. I worked closely with the acquisition and product managers. We met every two weeks to go over the numbers, brainstorm the next step, and execute.

User funnel study

Our current conversion rate before this project was 62%. Our data scientist at BabyCenter helped us identify different types of users based on their behavior. We learned that:

• 21% of users bailed after 1 or 2 clicks during the sign-up process

• 14% of frustrated users who went back and forth but ended up exiting the app.
  

Design iterations

Welcome tour on welcome screen

In order to catch the frustrated users mentioned in the study above, we designed a welcome tour walking through key features of the app. After launching the welcome tour, we found the conversion rate for users who took the tour was 31%, while users who skipped the tour had a conversion rate of 42%. Though we could further assess the sign-up intentions of users who took the tour versus skipped the tour, our team decided to pivot as the tour did not improve conversion rate.

After that, we ran another study and found even though only 29% users click on the sign-up button on the welcome page, their conversion rate was as high as 96% on the second screen. With that finding we decided to re-focus our direction on improving the welcome screen.

Sign-up flow rebranding

BabyCenter did a rebranding in 2020. We wanted to do a face lift for the welcome screen to match the rebranding but keep the functionality exactly the same, so we can measure the visual design impact on user desirability. Though the conversion rate between the rebranding and control were the same, the control attracted more users and therefore garnered more total sign-ups. The outcome of this test led our team to keep the control page.

Ask due date first

Since users download our app to track their pregnancy, we tried a new approach by asking their due date on the welcome screen. We did another A/B testing for this new design and saw the click through rate go from 29% to 70%. Overall, we saw a significant 13% increase in conversion rate.

Matrix

• Conversion rate was increased by 13%
  
  

next step

We are continually testing new ideas on registration flows.

Credit

Product

• UI / UX design: Amanda Wu

• Product manager: Rebecca Fisher

• Acquisition: Hanna Zhao

• Data Scientist: Rhian Thomas