Crafting an effortless sign up flow to increase conversion by 41%

Screenshot of Urban Rest home page

Work

Launched 2024

Clients

Shell Energy & Powershop

Team

Delivery Lead

Engineering Manager

Product Design Lead

4x Developers

Client Partner

Duration

5 months

Impact

Sign up flow redesign

+41% Conversion

Website re-platform

Big picture

Shell Energy acquired consumer energy retailer Powershop, prompting a full site re-platform to align tech stacks. This unlocked investment to optimise the experience.

Caveat

This project was running parallel to a website re-platform.

What's the problem?

Problem space

Powershop's primary sales channel — an energy plan sign-up flow — was suffering from significant drop-off.

The legacy plan discovery and sign-up flow's user experience had declined over time through technical blockers and strict compliance requirements.

The form itself also struggled to manage different user types, offloading returning and existing customers onto customer service.

Big picture

The Transport Accident Commission (TAC) is a government agency with the ambitious vision of eliminating all road deaths and serious injuries in Victoria, Australia by 2050.

End to end feature design

Diagnosing pain points, exploring solutions and pressure testing their performance to launch features with confidence.

Look

Immersion, research

Immersion, research

Think

Ideation, approaches

Ideation, approaches

Test

Plan, pressure testing

Plan, pressure testing

Launch

Design, implemention

Design, implemention

Measuring success

Success for this project means driving sign-up conversion through effortless plan discovery and sign-up flow.

Increase sign-up conversion

Elevate conversion metrics through an overhauled e2e sign-up flow.

Reduce form drop-off

Alleviating drop-off rates at key parts of the user flow.

Offload operational cost

Reduce the dependency on Powershop's customer service teams through alternate problem resolution paths.

Highlights from my design process

Jump to a section!

Immersion in the subject

Building a foundation for success

Understanding journey roadblocks

Diagnosing the causes

Ideation and validation

Exploring and testing ideas

Immersion in the subject

It's important to jump in and build solid context quickly. This stage of listening and learning helped to frame what to focus on, what not to focus on and where to be conscious of legal and compliance requirements.

Interrogating the business

Across nine workshops our team questioned the relevant aspects of the business to gain industry context, understand internal challenges and identify pain points.

Workshops:

Project kick-off, business strategy, brand & marketing, pricing & plans, regulatory & compliance, audience & customer journeys, content & templates, call centre/back office, technical/back-end.

Test results synthesised in Miro

Facilitated in Miro

Project kick-off, business strategy, brand & marketing, pricing & plans, regulatory & compliance, audience & customer journeys, content & templates, call centre/back office, technical/back-end.

Pain points identified

Through the immersion workshops, I built a picture of where the experience was suffering most — framing the focus areas my design ideation would explore.

Plan discovery

Address search was non-specific to the meter, leading to overestimated quotes to remain compliant.

18% of total searches deferred to customer service due to no address returned from API.

Regulatory and compliance information overwhelmed individual plan card UI.

No filter functionality to enable user to refine results based on their needs.

Sign-up form

Manual customer service process to capture user NMI (meter number) for accurate quote after sign-up.

Certain user journeys blocked mid form and referred to customer service.

Users inputs were not stored through the flow, requiring the user to repeat themselves.

Compliance requirements over time had increased the form length considerably to 6 steps.

There was no indication of how long the form would take.

Selected plans were not visible during the form.

Understanding journey roadblocks

Multiple points of high drop-off were caused by roadblocks in user journeys, induced by restrictive backend systems and compliance challenges.

Address lookup flow

I found the address lookup flow didn't provide enough flexibility to support self service in two areas, immediately offloading 18% of users to customer service before seeing plans and pricing.

  • When the users input didn't return a match — often due to inaccurate database records and recent subdivisions.

  • When the address had multiple NMI's (meter number) associated with it.

Sign-up form flow

I found that the form had no capacity to service existing and returning customers, failing to enable self service activities and severely impacting retention.

The form's information architecture was impacting the usability of the form, hiding a customer service dependant process late in the flow — making all user effort to this stage redundant.

Ideation and validation

Exploring solutions to pain points and flow opportunities, creating quick, lean prototypes to experiment and test across a panel of 200 participants split across desktop and mobile devices.

designs annotated with design recommendations

Unblocking the address lookup flow

Experimenting with alternate pathways by leveraging a unique NMI number for better accuracy.

Second line of defence when no address returned.

Allows users to resolve NMI conflicts themselves.

Offers clear problem resolution as last resort.

Simplifying plan discovery

Introduced customisation focused UI to help users find relevant plans.

Simplified plan card UI with minimum acceptable compliance requirements.

Surfacing recommendations and promotions with card banner.

Added cart surfacing offers/promotions and selected plans

designs annotated with design recommendations
designs annotated with design recommendations

Exploring the sign-up form flow

Designing an ideal flow from the ground up to guide users effortlessly through sign-up.

Reduced required fields and steps.

Introduced progress bar.

Revised form IA and field hierarchy.

Introduced existing customer flow.

Progressively revealing flow depending on answers.

Testing approach

Online testing designed to capture high level qualitative feedback reinforced by sentiment captured by qualitative questioning.

Test one: Plan discovery

Understanding user navigation through comparing and selecting plans.

Test two: Sign-up

Understanding sign up expectations and relevance/clarity of questions.

Validation

  • General usability across mobile and desktop devices was very consistent

  • 68% of users interacted with filter options to find the best option for them

  • 77% of users easily navigated around the gas step when not needing gas

Validation

  • 90% of users said they expect signing up to take up to 5 minutes (65/100 said up to 10 minutes!)

  • After completing the task 94% of users said the ʻMy Detailsʼ section of the form was a reasonable length

  • 90% of users after completing the task said the questions were all relevant

Key insights

  • 57% of users didn’t notice the promotion in their cart

  • Some users still found the quantity of information per plan overwhelming

Key insights

  • Users were happy with the length of the form and relevancy of fields