Sign up overhaul @ Fastly

The Fastly sign up form creates unwelcome friction for the target user. Users are required to submit fake information just to get through the form, and if the form errors, a prospect will look for an alternative solution with an easier sign up process.

Despite implementing new visual and content changes to improve the form, sign up conversion rates continue to decline. This leads to reduced quantity and quality of prospects. 

In order to win the business of certain enterprise customers, I worked with the brand design team to make the end-to-end sign up experience accessible to all users. We shipped WCAG Level AA compliant designs within a month before holiday break 2020, and tabled the UX improvements uncovered during my discovery and research that required cross-functional involvement. The accessibility improvements increased the form conversion by 5%, leaving a lot of room for improvement.

Fast forward to July 2022, I presented my hypothesis to marketing and sales that the improved designs would yield better quality leads in higher quantities if we resolved the obvious UX frictions caused by sales and marketing process dependencies to the data.

Once all teams were aligned on our shared goal to improve the < 1% conversion rate, the product manager and I worked with engineering to prioritize OAuth (adding sign up options using Github, Gmail or Magic-link) to remove the highest points of friction from the form. Alternative authentication methods also provided product, sales and marketing better prospect user data to work with.

Working closely with web engineering and brand design, I’m conducting A/B testing on the improved design variations and have already recorded a 3x increase in conversion rate and  the new designs are on the roadmap to ship before holiday break 2022.