Saas

Sign Up Form

Role: Lead UI/UX Designer

Navigating a sign-up process shouldn't feel like an obstacle course. At Clearstream, we knew our old sign-up workflow was more of a maze than a smooth path for users. Filled with too many forms and unnecessary clicks, our lead-to-sign-up rate wasn’t stellar. So, I dug into the nitty gritty to find out what was going wrong and create a more intuitive, user-friendly experience.

A high fidelity mobile mockup of the initial sign up page for Clearstream
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Challenges

  • Plateauing purchases: Our lead-to-purchase rate had flattened throughout 2023 at 21%.

  • Too many inputs: The form was cluttered with unnecessary options and an overwhelming number of inputs per page.

  • Bad mobile UX: The mobile experience was clunky, and required a lot of manual keyboard toggling.

Clearstream's old sign up page, from 2023, with 7 inputs on one page.

Before: Sign up form circa 2023 (Seven inputs on one page! 😢)

🫶 Sign Up Challenges exploration Loom

Exploration & Solutions

Reducing inputs, auto-filling based on context, and breaking the experience down into bite-sized pieces.

Research

To kickstart this project, I went through the sign-up process of every major competitor and took notes. What felt good about it? What wasn’t working? Then, I took screenshots and shared my notes with the team.

More pages = less mental load

This one seems counterintuitive, but less information on each page lightens the mental load. Our sign-up process went from four pages to seven, almost double.

We gave users more mental space to focus on their purchase, which led to higher lead-to-purchase conversion.

This approach also significantly reduces the chances of option paralysis, making the process less overwhelming.

Throughout the redesign, I pitched the team on a single-input sign-up. While this is standard for many competitors, the stakeholders never quite caught the vision. I wish I could have persuaded them!

The redesigned password input field, with validation

Smart defaults

I found a lot of redundancies in the old form.

Users had to select a country and input a country code. But we already could find that information, so why we we asking them for it? They had to select their industry type as ‘Church’, but 90% of our leads are churches. Why do that work?

We opted to auto-fill wherever possible, giving users the option to customize if they wanted.

A gif of the phone number input form, with a country code icon that automatically toggles the area code

Sweating the details

Easing friction matters when asking folks to pay for something.

  • Easy typing: We dug into every input and made sure the keyboard that popped up was the one users needed, so they didn’t need to toggle from the alphabet to numbers.

  • No scrolling: All information was available at a glance, without scrolling… and scrolling…and scrolling.

  • Smart Defaults: Smart defaults pre-filled information and reduced the typing required from the user.

A preview of the mobile billing keyboard

Results

Clearstream’s lead-to-purchase sign-up rate went from 21% to 36% in just four months 🎉

The sign-up form is everyone’s introduction to our software, so it needs to reflect the same care, thought, and attention to detail.

Our changes helped more folks make a big decision about the communication tool they were going to use. Making things easier for users really pays off!

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