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Case Study 02 Bespoke Retirement (Guiide)

Guiide, a free retirement planning service that assists consumers in getting the most out of their pension funds, saw a reduction in customer sign-ups on the Finish page after completing the main journey.

Key Objective

Investigate why customers are not registering their email address after completing the main journey and increase client sign-ups on the Finish page.

Research & Discovery

There was no scope in the project to run customer interviews, so I relied on watching videos of users interacting with the Guiide tool via the company's Hotjar account in order to obtain insights and highlight customer pain points that can be improved. I selected 25 random videos to get a good spread of users to see if I could identify any obvious patterns.

Key Findings

  • A large percentage of customers skimmed through their retirement plan details and did not seem overly interested in completing the registration form, despite almost half of the users hovering over the registration form at some point.
  • Despite the registration form having a prominent place at the top of the page, Heatmap analysis highlighted that over half of customers were scrolling directly to their retirement plan results and the registration form was often overlooked.
  • Almost all of the users in the 25 videos did not read the page in the order it was laid out. There was a lot of scrolling back and fourth looking at the different parts of their retirement plan.

Competitor Analysis

To understand how I might want to optimise the registration flow and boost sign-ups, I conducted a competitor analysis focusing on websites and apps with similar journeys that required customers to register their details. I also looked at multiple customer onboarding journeys, which rely largely on customer feedback.

Brainstorming & Ideation

I led a virtual whiteboard session with some of the team (product owner and senior developer) using FigJam to establish goals, divide users into groups, identify pain points and sketch some initial ideas using "Crazy 8's". This helped us narrow down our hypothesis for why customers were either missing the registration form or choosing not to register. Once we were all satisfied with our whiteboard concepts, I began sketching out some preliminary ideas to present back to the team.

Design Solution

Based on the customer videos from Hotjar, competitor analysis, and the whiteboard session, I focussed on two main areas;

  1. The registration form;
    1. Customer behaviour indicated that they preferred to view their retirement plan first and foremost, therefore I placed the registration form directly below the retirement plan table to make it more connected to the plan and visible to users.
    2. I modified the text next to the registration form to more clearly emphasise the benefits that users would receive by registering with Guiide.
    3. Initially, I intended to hide some of the advanced functionality until the customer registered, but this was not feasible due to business reasons. So, when you try to access them without registering, the Register CTA shakes to call attention to itself.
  2. The layout of the Finish page;
    1. Using Hotjar's Heatmap analysis, I reorganised the structure of the Finish page so that customers could read through their retirement plan more intuitively, finishing with the registration form last.
    2. I consolidated the various sections of the plan into fewer panels, which reduced scrolling and allowed clients to view more of their retirement plan in one location.

Outcome & Results

The redesign led to a significant improvement in user engagement and sign-up conversions. Key outcomes included:

  • There was a 35% increase in customer sign-ups within the first three months of release.
  • Feedback from post-launch surveys showed an increase in user satisfaction, with many highlighting the clarity and ease of the new Finish page.

Conclusion

This project had a very short timeframe to deliver value, so it was critical that I was able to extract useful insights from the customer data in order to drive the ideation phase based on actual customer experience. It was also vital that these insights were rapidly translated into actionable concepts that could be developed, released, and iterated on as needed.