User onboarding: Replace current email confirmation flow with a 'soft email confirmation flow'
Description
Waiting until after users have seen your product's value before asking them to confirm their email can increase your "Signup" to "First Key Action" rate by up to 100%. —Source: 3 common SaaS signup flows
The current user registration flow is quite laborious when email confirmation is enabled for registration. It takes a user 15 major interactions and 4 screens to complete the registration. 15 major steps before the users get what they want: start using and exploring GitLab. The current flow is mapped in the user journey below:
Proposal
If there are no legal or other reasons for not doing it, we should explore a 'soft email confirmation flow' where the users register through only 7 major interactions and two screens (half less for both). That would mean removing the 'Almost finished' screen that currently interrupts the flow and forces the users to confirm their email right away. With a soft approach, the users would be able to confirm their email at a time that is convenient for them and it would also allow them to explore the tool straight away.
A persistent 'you need to confirm your email' message would follow the users as they explore the tool but as we see in the mockup below, they're inside the tool almost instantaneously (I skipped the 'Terms' page for the sake of example simplicity).
A user who has not confirmed their email address will not receive email notifications. Are there other actions that a user with an unconfirmed address should not be able to do?
I feel this, along with other user onboarding improvements, could help with user acquisition and retention on gitlab.com. We just need a way to measure those.
For CE and EE, this could be a feature that can be turned on or off.
Example from 750 words:
Solution
We're solving three problems with this:
- users that are signing up for GitLab want to get to using/exploring it ASAP
- some users get stuck in the registration process because they don't receive a confirmation email
- some users mistype their email address and can't complete their registration (or update their email address to the correct one)
Soft email confirmation alert:
All possible flows in soft email confirmation:
Prototype flows
Key things we need to get right:
- There are two possible problems in the registration flow: 1) the user didn't receive the confirmation email 2) they mistyped the email address and need to update it. We need to address both of these.
- If the user clicks on 'Resend it' we need to tell them that it was sent. We can do that with a toast message (artboard)
- If the user hasn't confirmed their email yet and they change it in the settings, we need to resend the confirmation email and let them know that we did (artboard).
- We keep showing the soft email warning message until users confirm their email (artboard with updated email address)
Comments:
- The prototyped flows include registration improvement suggestions from gitlab-org/gitlab-ce#48851