The approach
Early 2022, we ran an initial review of our mobile and desktop ad campaigns, and we highlighted a need to “improve conversion rates from installs to subscriptions to gain efficiency in CPA (Cost per acquisition).
We found that users were dropping off very early in the process. When the users got to the subscription screen, we knew about roughly 50% of them ended up subscribing. Our task was to find out what might be triggering this huge early drop off, and improve the account conversion rate, in turn, improving the subscription conversion rate.
Before getting to the discovery, we had to determine the product and business goals. What issues, if any, were the users experiencing early in the funnel and how do we solve these issues in order to bring our account conversion rate up?
I led the design team for the VPN product. I was responsible for the strategy and visual design. I worked alongside a Service Designer, a Researcher, a Content Designer, a Product Manager and a Data Scientist through the entirety of this project, from conception to launch.
The feature launched globally in late 2022, on all platforms.
We needed to figure out why this was happening. We looked at the telemetry and available data to understand the percentage of drop off through each step of the way. All we knew was that users were not creating accounts.
As a design team we conducted a Service Blueprint study to map out the entire user journey from pre purchase to subscriptions and use. We wanted to try and find friction points that may be contributing to customer dropoff.
During this study we pulled previous research and conducted focus groups with 16 team members, facilitating multiple sessions with the customer service team, the engineering team, the UX team and Leadership. We asked them aboout:
As a team, we spent time in a workshop synthesizing the data we got from all the sources and placed them onto an action priority matrix:
When comparing with previous research we were to find 6 common emerging themes, and decided to focus on the top 3:
We found that users were getting confused by our account creation and login flow and there was a lot of research to support our hypothesis. Even though the Mozilla VPN was an App, not a web application, we were forcing users to login through the web and create a “Firefox Account” (FxA). This was confusing for users as they had to navigate out of the app, and then create an account on a completely different branded portal, and then come back into the app to subscribe.
I decided to pivot from the post download workstream, this workstream would be handled in a different phase alongside other marketing related work.
I began to map out the the current flow of a user going from install to subscription and what happens in the background. We were able to identify 2 main points of friction in the flow:
Continuously using our target persona and marketing profile to guide our decisions, we knew that one of their core pain points was having too many logins to keep track of. Q&A users also don’t like to put in a lot of effort into learning to use tools correctly. We had to create a solution that removed any extra steps and reduced cognitive load. Our strategy was to:
It was clear that this was the correct move, there was quite a bit of push back on doing this because no other Mozilla products moved away from the “Firefox Accounts” model, but I pushed hard because I knew this would help solve both the product and business goals.
Previously the user had to leave the the app in order to log into Mozilla VPN. This would force the user outside of the core flow.
With this change, the user never has to leave the app in order to create an account or sign in. This forces the user to stay within the core flow, which reduces possible issues, and helps increase conversion.
Previously the login screens on the web were banded with the Firefox name and logo. The mixed branding felt disconneced and confusing, and the research told us that users felt this way too.
With this change, not only does the user stay within the core flow, the flow actually makes sense, this was a Mozilla branded product and now the story is much clearer.
I mapped out the architecture of the core flow and the potential error states. For this phase we were going to worry about account creation and authentication. For phase two, we were going to look at the “Forgot password” flow which was still done through the web.
After looking at our main competitors, we knew all of them implemented in-app account creation and authentication. The team looked at this as a “feature parity” piece of work - the PM and I decided that we would launch the feature without any testing and monitor its performance.
After implementing this feature with product telemetry we continued to track the data over the course of the the next few months. The support team and I also monitored the tickets related to login failure and the results were overwhelmingly positive!
We found that roughly 50% of users who make it to the subscription screen end up subscribing (this is an upper bound). Our job was to stop users from dropping off before this point, by improving account conversion rate we would in turn be improving subscription conversion rate.
Before implementation account creation rates were sitting around 50%, whereas after, account creation success rates rose to around 75%. This is a massive 50% increase in conversion success rate.
Despite the fact that our customer base grew YoY, support tickets related to login failure dropped ~60% when we moved to in-app account creation and authentication.
After the clear success of implementing this feature, we made small iterations based on some of the data that came in from telemetry, but overall, nothing major changed.
We were able to identify another friction point in the funnel. Users weren’t quite sure what they can use VPN for and why Mozilla VPN specifically. We decided to add a product onboarding to inform the user about the benefits of Mozilla VPN pre-purchase. I led the delivery of this, and created the animations as well.
When collaborating with the customer support team, we also found that users were unaware of desired features within the VPN.
Since the VPN being mostly a “set it and forget it” application, we added a user onboarding to help users set up their environment on first run, but also bring awareness to these desired features for future use.