Usability & Interaction design for Esper website signup experience

Overview

This project was as Hiring Task given to me before I joined Esper. I was asked to do a Critique of their Signup experience and suggest if we could make any improvements to that. I did cognitive task analysis for the Siignup process and Esper Team Liked my approach and eventually, I was hired as a lead product designer.

Later when I joined, The first thing I did was to improve signup experience which eventually helped to increase the signup rate by almost 50 % over the period of time.

Scope and Constraints

Scope was to majorly limited to signup process, but optional to test dashboard too.

Also, 24 hrs was the time constraint given to me.

Problem Statement

The Problem statement given to me was

"To critique the signup experience and suggest an alternative. Also once you signup you will be lead to the dashboard. You can pick the home screen and critique or suggest alternatives as well."

Customers/ Users

For me This time the direct customer was Esper company itself. However, while doing analysis I tried to fit into Esper's users shoes.

Roles & Responsibities

Comapany : Esper

Me : Usability testing and interaction Design

Collegue : Visual designer

Process

Research

For time constraints I was not able to do primary research, where I could have talked to actual users. However, I have used the secondary research methods & tried to understand the user's needs, wants challenges, goals & objectives.

I went through some competitive companies, some blogs, and tried to understand their user & nature of their business vertical. It helped me to get a fair idea of their domain & what their customers looked like.

However, for the Signup process, It did not much need to understand the user in such detail. But it was good to have the insights before started.

Mind Map output after all the research

User persona

Customer Profile

CTA Analysis for Signup Process

Once I had a clear understanding of the user persona & their business vertical, I jumped to their website & started the Signup process.

Singn-up Analysis findings

Esper Signup Experience Map

Cognitivie thouhgts during each step of signup process

Competition Signup analysis comaprision

Moodboards for insipiration

Alternate Ideation for signup

Wireframes

Visual Design Ideation

CTA Analysis for Dashboard

Alternate Ideation for Dashbaord

Wireframes

Visual Design Ideation

Outcomes & Lessons learned

1. This whole process was based on secondary research because of time constraints, so the personas & customer differed a little from actual needs & wants. Also, I was not aware of the Organisation, development & business constraints, that could also make changes in the design approach. The results could be optimized even better when detailed information is collected.

However when I joined Esper later , I did improved the experience along with my colleague there.

We reduced the time of signup by 95% and increased the customer's signup rate by 50%. The end result was just one step to complete. Just filling basic 2-3 details & done within a fraction of seconds user was on the dashboard.

Here is the current Signup page.

We made a number of changes in design & identified which areas need to be reduced or improved. There were two main areas which we needed to tackle :

As a business constraint, Esper wanted to validate the users if they are enterprise customers or not. Esper was not interested in getting the random leads. Solution So as a business constraint we did not allow any non work mail to get a signup. Only work email domains were allowed.

The other major reason for the reduction in signup rate was the time taken to create an environment for the user when he clicked on SIgnup. It usually used to takes 2-3 minutes and sometimes more. And hence we saw a huge drop in the waiting area This was major because from the backend side we used to create a realtime IoT endpoint that needed to run a few scripts before we could let them get started. Solution I suggested the team pre-create some endpoints on the backend beforehand and the moment user signs up, just assign the endpoint instead of creating a new one. And it worked very well with us.

The biggest lesson learned in this project was that the best user experiences are not always on digital screen but are invisible and I truly believe that and I have achieved it a number of times with other features too.