Designing a better registration flow
This story is about how Confere reduced error by eliminating all manual processes at the registration flow.
Confere is a bank and credit card reconciliation startup that aims at empowering small business owners to achieve financial control. The company, founded in 2018, has been attending to small businesses in order to help them adapt to a digital-based economy.
My role
- User research 🔍
- Information Architecture 📐
- Wireframes 👨💻
- UI design 🖍
Results
- Reduced the number of steps in the company’s registration process and cut down the number of possible errors related to the form.
- Dramatically decreased the time to complete registration.
- Trimmed down the required effort on the approval system of customer registration.
Challenge
Until March 2019, the flow of signup in the Confere system was 90% manual. Once the deal was closed, new customers received an email with a PDF file attached, containing the registry info they needed to provide. The customers had to print the document, sign it, scan the signed document, and send it back through email. Then, an employee would be assigned to review and validate the data sent by each customer.
We knew the company wouldn’t be able to develop and grow if changes weren’t made in the registration flow.
How might we improve the registration process to allow more customers to sign up with as little effort required as possible?
Discovery & Definition
I started by interviewing stakeholders and talking to some new clients to understand and map the customer’s registration journey.
The main outcomes were:
- The central reason for Confere’s use of a paper form still was the need for the customers’ signature.
- Most of the errors done by users were caused by misunderstanding information and forgetting to fill the required fields.
- The majority of the customers didn’t know where to find some of the information needed to fill the form.
- A document with all the requirements needed to approve the registrations.
The customer’s registration journey looked something like this:
Ideation
Along with the stakeholders, we designed what we assumed to be the simplest and most trouble-free register flow. Once we validated the flow and defined how we would transform the need for a printed signature into a digital process, I started to work on the user interface.
I sketched some ideas and, described how the UI would meet the requirements. Then, I validate the viability of some concepts with developers.
Prototype
For the UI the goal was to keep the user focused on the task and aware of where to find any information needed to fill the form. In order to achieve that:
- I divided the application into four steps: welcome screen, customer personal information, company inputs, and digital signature.
- Designed a help button with a guide and answers to the most frequent questions, always visible to the user.
- Added next to every field a prompt for instructions on where to find the information needed.
- Added a summary always visible while scrolling the screen.
Test
We tested the prototypes with coworkers from several teams, also with all the stakeholders. After a few usability and requirements improvements, we were confident to start developing the new registration flow.
The following couple of months were dedicated to analyzing and improving the registration flow and interfaces.
Using LogRocket to record the sessions and analyze user behavior, we were able to experiment with some adjustments:
- Shifting the step one and two: Users were dropping the form before filling the company inputs, so we shifted it to be the first step, it reduced form dropout;
- Changing the onboarding screen to give users more context;
- Responsiveness adjustments.
There are a few details that I would still like to change to improve the user experience. However, we reached an important milestone for the company: we reduced the average time to fill out the form from 3 days to 20 minutes and increased the number of sales without hiring more employees.
