THE GUARDIAN

Leading the UX & Research design strategy to significantly scale the number of registered and signed in Guardian users

6-8 months after release of the new designs:

Increased sign in conversions by 16% in the UK, 12% in the US & EU, 9% in Australia
Conversions were 11% higher among casual browsers and 20% for engaged browsers

This project involved coming on board to lead a UX & Research strategy to increase the number of registered users, improve the sign in/register experience, and keep users signed in. The Guardian wanted to understand the most effective way of approaching this, and to understand the impact it would have on the rest of the digital experience, across responsive web and Guardian apps.

We learnt a huge amount about sign in, registration, brand and data ethic and I interviewed/tested with 96 users in the Guardian Lab and on usertesting.com

Below are various methods we used to deliver this strategy.

Scaling the number of signed in users

The core strategy focused around increasing the number of registered and signed in users so that we could:

􏰀 Improve the understanding of the audience
􏰀 Build user habits
􏰀 Increase ad revenue by having more engaged and
identifiable users

Messaging & ethical considerations

Signing in contradicted with the existing Guardian ethos and mission - which was to make journalism free, open and available to anyone.

Mandatory sign in worked for other news and media organisations because it was linked to users tv licence and that was already a barrier to entry - The Guardian didn’t have any in place.

There were also risks around privacy and accessibility that we needed to consider.

Challenges with competitor sites and perception

The competition from other websites offering free and open content was significant.

Other sign in messaging on news sites related to a paywall.

Understanding sign in motivations, behaviours and needs

We started the discovery by testing messaging concepts to understand what would most likely prompt users to sign in.

The messaging that stood out the most was to sign in and help keep the independent journalism alive.

This was in line with years of messaging research done by the contributions team.

Users didn’t respond well to signing in for features.

Honesty, transparency and supporting the journalism worked best for users

From a qual perspective we decided to start with some Guerrilla testing a gate in Kings Cross station on mobile web.

Designing MVP priority user journeys

The insight we gathered lead us to understand that a 'garden path' that would lead users to a mandatory gate would possibly be a good way to approach the design.

These were quite complex and involved problems throughout the flows.

But we decided to focus on the sign in component to start - calling it a ‘gate’ rather than a wall.

We decided on when and how it would display to users and the elements that would make it a ‘gate’ rather than a ‘wall’ because a wall would have contradicted with The Guardian mission and ethos.

We did consider mandatory but this would have been too interruptive and too much of a risk.

Our strategy involved mapping as a team and running design workshops to create the first version of the gate.

Testing MVP journeys

Once we had decided on the flow and display rules, we started with rapid iterative testing. We did remote testing of three variants of the gate design.

We wanted to test some key simple things - focusing on natural user behaviour and journeys.

We were working with the marketing department to understand user types and we used this to inform how we recruited users.

We learnt some key things from this research and iterated the design for the nextround of remote testing.

Iterating and making improvements

We focused on key changes and the variant testing allowed us to test a variety of hypotheses.

The results of the second round of testing gave us more insight, but also further showed the buy in from users with the ‘keeping the journalism alive’ messaging.

We generated ideas and concepts for how to move forward with solving the problem.

As well as how to position the language and flow of the gate.

Bringing the MVP to a live audience

The next step was to test the design with a live audience and testing a control gate and a variant gate to see the result. This gave us further insight to design around.

We released the design to a portion of the live audience. This gave us quantitative insight to design around.

We continued to run these quantitative live tests alongside qualitatively testing different versions of the gate.

This showed every time that users bought into the ‘keeping the independent journalism alive.’ messaging. It gave us an understanding of the key characteristics we needed to bring into the messaging.

We also designed the journey and messaging on the app and ran qualitative user testing to see the results.

Results and impact of the testing

All of our testing and research allowed us to develop a clear set of language and design principles for sign in.

Once we had gone through the continual testing and analysis we gathered quantitative insight from the Data & Insight team to understand the impact on reader revenue.

We saw this had generated increased conversions across all key user groups.

Designing the end to end sign in experience

Once we had released the sign in gate we started to look at the wider sign in and registration journeys, as well as how it should be positioned with journeys across the site.

We ran more user research discovery into this, as well as ideation workshops and followed the double diamond product development approach.

This allowed us to understand how to iterate on existing journeys, bringing a better sign in and registration experience to users.

We designed new journeys to test from this next phase of user research, worked on wireframes for the new experience, and built design system components in Figma for the journeys.

This allowed us to develop a wider strategy and longer term vision for sign in and registration.