Reducing Friction in Signup and Purchase Flows Resulting in Doubled Activation Rates.

Overview

At Pragmatic Works, I identified and resolved major contributors of churn to help the platform achieve:

• Reducing the time-to-completion metrics for our purchase flow by 35% by redesigning the entire purchase experience.

• More-than-doubling the activation rate (from 4.5% to over 10%) by reducing friction in the purchase flow and designing a more intuitive, trustworthy pricing page that users favored.

• Reduced friction points in user journey that deterred users from experiencing sufficient value out of the services offered, resulting in higher conversions.

• Launching a new digital product, augmenting value proposition of platform - focused on certification preparation.

Challenges

When I started with Pragmatic works, my audits had surfaced many friction points that prevented people from considering the platform as a service. The user journey for new customers were filled with:

• Navigation bugs disrupted freemium sign-ups.

• Critical pages like pricing and cart flow lacked clarity, had poor usability in mobile, and poor time-to-value metrics.

• Many pages lacked visual hierarchy, resulting in longer completion metrics and more missteps.

When first presenting this, stakeholders prioritized feature rollout over addressing core usability issues, following their intuition over validated data points. In short, it took time to prove the value of UXR, and how I can support them to make data-informed decisions.

Journey map of new user creating an account & trying platform

Approach

• Analytics & Research: Used HotJar and mapping practices to reveal usability pain points and opportunity space for PM. I triangulated this with survey data coming from HotJar feedback widget, and offboarding surveys, in Churnkey. I also leveraged diary studies from sales & customer support, to identify the voice of the customer.

  • Stakeholders were shocked at some of the instances where a user struggled for over 30m creating an account with the platform. Once they learned they needed to "walk in their shoes", I gained their trust in influencing their strategy.

• Iterative Design: Redesigned cart flows, pricing pages, and course details with reusable components, hoping to reducing dev costs of a dev team that struggled with accurate replications.

• Proactive Advocacy: Presented findings to leadership, prioritizing user-centric improvements alongside new features the CEO was focused on releasing.

Results

Key fixes, like resolving navigation bugs, and UI enhancements significantly boosted activation rates. Lightweight redesigns reduced cognitive load, enhancing user experience while aligning with business goals. Future updates focus on scalable improvements and documenting best practices to avoid rushed releases. This case highlights the impact of aligning UX strategy with business objectives for measurable growth.

An excerpt from a presentation on PLG I had provided to the leadership team. This informed the business strategy, and where product strategy should focus energy to reach business objectives.

Screens from original cart flow. Note the poor cancellation flow and confusing progress-tracker elements.

Redesigned cart experience, adding the ability to purchase multiple items, use coupon codes. Note the usage of testimonials and Stripe branding to enhance the sense of security in their purchase.

A "Before & After" of a lightweight redesign to the course details template to enhance time-to-value metric. Note the usage of "Free-Preview" tags to guide freemium users to what is available to them.

I mapped out an opportunity solution tree, to help the PM and stakeholders identify what pain points and solutions are validated with actual user data (avoiding wasted efforts via guesswork).

Conclusion

Thank you for your time and interest in this case study. If you'd like to learn more about this story, feel free to contact me. Also, please check out other case studies, listed below. Thanks again.