Assessing the newspapers online funnels to set it up for a future of online readers and subscribers.
To understand our online readers better, and to provide them with the best personalised news service, there was a need to increase our number of registered users. Becoming a registered user gives you access to a number of benefits, such as exclusive newsletters and the ability to post comments.
As a publication with a rich brand history the Evening Standard has a large number of loyal readers. Commuters across the country pick up a copy of the daily print edition to stay up to date on the latest news. During the Coronavirus however many people turned to the Standard's website as working from home became the new norm.
I was tasked with working out why our current registration journey was underperforming, and to design a new version that performed better and was focussed on a mobile users' experience.
To understand user frustrations with the current experience I ran a number of usability testing sessions, tasking users with completing the sign up process to understand where the journey was under performing.
The original journey encompassed two steps, an initial sign up page that acted as a first step to determine whether the user already has an account and then the sign up form itself. Most users found this initial stage confusing as they believed it was all that was needed to register. It did not serve much of a purpose and I decided it was unneeded. The benefits of a registration were also shown, but weren't very compelling, I felt these points could be distilled down and incorporated onto the main form quite easily.
I was able to identify a number of fields that were causing frustration or confusion for the user. Many users were unsure why we asked for a year of birth, some were unwilling to provide us with their gender identity and the same went for country of residence. It became clear that we needed to outline more effectively the reasons for requiring this data to alleviate any fears. New helper and error text was defined to help users understand at each stage what we required and why. Other fields changed entirely, such as "Gender", which is a piece of information we now infer from "Title."
There were also some fields that could be removed entirely. The username field was only relevant for those users who wanted to comment on articles, and so I recommended that it be removed from this form and then give them the ability to choose a "commenting name" at the point of commenting. Data from GA also told me that there were rarely issues with mismatched password fields, and so it was decided to just provide one field but make the characters visible by default.
"To understand user frustrations with the current experience I ran a number of usability testing sessions, tasking users with completing the sign up process to understand where the journey was under performing."
The old form was both overly long and complex. With the updated fields determined I looked at multiple ways in which we could group them. I wanted the form to be as compact as possible whilst still adhering to our strict design system spacing rules.
The core benefits of a registration are now highlighted at the top, with the option for users to visit a more comprehensive benefits page if needed. Certain fields were also grouped horizontally to save vertical space, such as "Title" and "First name." The full registration process went from 13 fields (if you include the pre-registration form page) to 8.
Further usability testing led to a few more tweaks with error messaging, but feedback was positive across the board. Users felt the form was visually appealing, easy to use and relatively short.
Post launch feedback has been extremely positive. Registration success rates have increased by over 10%, with an indication that this will continue to grow as more data is collated.
Customer complaints have also fallen, reducing pressure on the internal customer service team.
Building a video game from the ground up for Brackeys' game jam 2024.
Overhauling how the whole editorial team runs their news desks day to day.
