Free trial signup flow improvements: flow and UI improvements
Problem to solve
Improve the flow of the free trial signup. Atm, it's broken down into two separate steps (user registration + trial sign up in Subscription Manager).
Intended users
All users of GitLab.com.
Further details
Currently, the steps the users need to take to sign up for a free trial are completely separate and the users are burdened with figuring out how exactly they should progress through the interface to successfully set up an account and start a free trial. For example, these are the instructions the users need to follow for Cloud/GitLab.com:
Users shouldn't be required to follow instructions for such a basic thing as signing up for a free trial. So we need to simplify the process and automate some steps that users need to complete on their own right now.
Proposal
Current onboarding user journey
Comment: It takes 37 actions from users to sign up for the free trial.
Video-documented attempt to sign up for a trial
Video-documented attempt to sign up for a trial (mobile)
How the free trial signup + guided onboarding journey should be
Comment: In 39 actions (almost equal to the 'current onboarding journey') users sign up for the free trial, find out how issues work and create a new label and add it to an issue (through guided onboarding).
Signing up for the free trial only takes users 12 actions
State of mind of users as they complete the free trial sign up flow:
Current | Goal |
---|---|
All the flows for signing up for a free trial can be broken down like this:
The self-hosted trial sign up flow and the one where a user already has an account aren't problematic. The problematic flow is the one where users don't have an account yet and they want to sign up for one and activate a free trial at once. The main problem is that the two steps (registration & free trial sign up) don't communicate well with each other and are completely separate steps and the flow is very broken as a consequence.
The big orange button on the homepage says 'Try GitLab for free' so our flows should deliver what we promise through that button. Here are suggested improvements to improve the flow.
We should have a unified register + free trial flow that depends based on the intent (registering only, registering & signing up for a trial, ...) and user type (existing/non-existing) on entry to the flow (outlined on the right in the image above). The flow should be uniform and not divided into two separate flows.
Flow (UX) improvements
- Go straight to Welcome/Guided onboarding after signing up
- automatically create a subscription manager account directly after user completes filling in the form
- automatically assign the free trial license to the user account that was just created through the flow
Register form improvements (UI)
The registration form as it is now, comes with many obstacles that users need to overcome to create an account. We should simplify this form so that they can create their account very quickly.
- Divide the input 'Full name' into separate 'First name' and 'Last name'
- Automatic available username generation
- Remove CAPTCHA (or replace with the invisible CAPTCHA or something similar)
- Remove 'Email confirmation' input
- Add fields for subscription manager if the user started their journey with an intent to start a free trial ('Try GitLab for free')
The main goal of these improvements is that the users don't need to separately interact with the Subscription manager but that most of that work is automatically completed when they fill in all the required info.
We need a unified flow for registration and/or free trial signup that changes slightly based on what the intent of the user is. Intents can be either:
- non-existing user: sign up (register), start a free trial
- non-existing user: sign up (register)
- existing user: start a free trial
Testing
What does success look like, and how can we measure that?
- Users are able to sign up for the free trial in 1 minute or less
- Reduce interactions that users need to make from 37 to ~ 15
- Reduce the number of screens/pages that the users navigate through from 10 to ~ 4
- Users are able to successfully sign-up for free trials at a higher rate.