ARRAY Portfolio Sign-Up Flow Case Study

The Profile Completion Bottleneck

ARRAY’s product and engineering team were asked the question,”Why is our profile completion rate only 7%? People are missing out on key career opportunities and this is the crux of our product.” The ARRAY product team recognized they had a major opportunity. If they were able to focus on improving the profile sign up flow, they could dramatically increase the rate of sign up conversions, representing thousands of new below the line crew members added to their database.

Goals

The business goal was to have 250 users complete their profile per week, which equates to over 10,000 new below the line crew members added to the studio database per year. But how? ARRAY had not spent time optimizing or understanding their existing profile sign up flow, so we asked for opinions from 10 users that met the following criteria:Not familiar with the productAn active below the line crew memberAge 25-55

Previous Flow

User Interviews

We watched users sign up for profiles and followed up with some questions. Here are some of the common themes that surfaced:

When a user initially signs up, they are pretty confused about what information is required to have an active profile. The required data isn’t obvious.
Users are presented with an extremely long form. The length is daunting and leads to users stopping halfway through the signup process.

Error messages aren’t detailed, leaving users guessing on what information they may have left out.

As well as being vague the error message would still show even when users technically had all the required fields filled out, causing extreme levels of frustration. This error led to a 63% drop off rate.

Through our research, we identified many of the experiential pain points within the flow. Of the users who filled out all of the required information, only 37% of them successfully created profiles. So the majority of users who are taking the time to fill out the form most are leaving due to frustration and confusion! We need to fix this.“I don’t feel very confident in the company's ability to land me a job after spending a good amount of time filling out the form only to have to start again because of an error on their side.”

- ARRAY Testing Subject

New Flow

The project deliverable was an updated sign up flow for both mobile and desktop environments. My role was to collaborate on the strategy, wireframe, design, and develop the new flow.

The updated sign up flow solves most of the problems gathered from our research with an improved multi-step UI. A clear sense of progress is created with a numerical step indicator. This gives the user a sense of context as they navigate through the flow. More specific error messages are added throughout the steps to let the user know exactly what information is missing. The amount of information asked for upfront is greatly reduced. My hypothesis is that users will progress through all seven steps without friction, leading to an increase in conversion and a major decrease in dropoff, ultimately delivering the goal of 250 new subscriptions per week.

Step One: Create Account

A user is signing up for a profile to be entered in a database that will be accessible to hiring managers across different studios in the industry, so there isn’t much inherent risk or trust issues we have to anticipate from users. Knowing this we can jump into asking the user for their basic account information. The key here is to ensure we are grouping similar information together to help reduce the cognitive load for the users and help them maintain a positive outlook of the progress they are making through the steps. Step one is all about collecting the basics, name, date of birth, and gender identity and allowing the user to provide a profile photo if they want. This is all information the user should be familiar with providing in most account sign up flows.

Step Two: Experience

In version one of the flow, users were taking down a flow where they would add credits in one section, scroll down to provide more information and would then be asked for their preferred job title, and so on for their guild and primary working city. There was no organization of the most important information when it comes to securing a new role. The experience step, groups and collects all of this information together. Again, reducing the cognitive load of having to switch between different thinking for example providing your bio and then being asked for your job title just doesn’t flow and doesn’t give the user a sense of flow when providing information.

Step Three: Race

Users were pleased with how inclusive the race section of the profile was. So, overall we wanted to keep the changes to this section to a minimum. One, issue users brought up was how much information was being shown to them at once. To reduce the amount of information being displayed we decided to hide the input box until a user selects a race. The idea here is to allow the user to focus on one race at a time. Ensuring they aren’t overwhelmed and the cognitive load remains low.

Step Four: Additional Documents

Step four is all about collecting additional documents that will help speed up the verification process for ARRAY’s admin team. Prior, to the step being put in place ARRAY’s admin team was going through and googling each user to find additional information they could use to help verify who the user was. This was not only time consuming but also error prone. With the addition of this step ARRAY’s admin team was able to 2x the amount of users they verified in an hour.

Step Five: Social Accounts

Step five allows users to provide their social accounts. We left this step for last because while social accounts can be helpful to quickly showcase one off projects hiring managers rely more heavily on credits and experience and utilize the social accounts as a way to get a feel for who the user is on a personal level. So, the social accounts are usually the last things hiring managers check out before making a decision on who they want to hire. Thus, we wanted to ensure the user was using more of their mental efforts on pieces of the profile that could solidify or deter a hiring manager’s decision.

Overview

Overall, the launch of the new flow went really well and the team was able to hit our business goals, of getting over 10,000 new users into the database in the first year. Follow up interviews with exisiting customers were really positive and our customer support team reported a 27% decrease in support tickets surrounding creating a new profile.