Driving Signups and Conversion
I led design on multiple touchpoints across Common Sense’s products to get users into subscription funnels and make sign-in/sign-up more streamlined.
ContextCommon Sense’s two main product experiences—”Common Sense Media” for parents and “Common Sense Education” for educators—each have different engagement models. I designed many features/changes to increase conversion and sign-ups across both products.
Common Sense Media, which offers age-based media reviews and recommendations for parents, operates on a Freemium model. Creating a free account mainly gives users the ability to contribute their own reviews to the site, while a monthly subscription gives users unlimited access to media reviews (users are restricted to 3 reviews per month otherwise) and personalized media recommendations for their family.
Common Sense Education, which offers a range of educator-focused products from classroom curricula to edtech reviews to teaching advice, is purely free. Signing up gives users access to specific classroom curricula resources, the ability to contribute their own reviews on edtech tools, and more.
My rolesProduct Designer (Growth)
TeamProduct Manager
Product Designer (me)
VP of Brand
Copywriter
UX Researcher
Engineers
Stakeholders from Marketing, Editorial, and Business Development
Increasing Clickthrough to the Subscription Funnel from the Product Homepage by 3x
Lead Product Designer
Team: Product Manager, UX Researcher, Design Director, Engineers
Common Sense Media has an ongoing business goal to convert users to the premium version of their site experience, which gives users unlimited access to reviews and personalized media recommendations for their family.
We designed buttons on the homepage (which gets 200K monthly users) that resulted in a 3x increase in clicks into the subscription funnel, in close collaboration with our UX researcher and the design team.
The homepage’s existing subscription entrypoint was a large blue “wizard” that allowed users to select their kid’s age. It was moderately successful, capturing clicks from 3% of homepage users.
To improve, our UX researcher spearheaded a separate project to move this wizard further into the browsing experience with more personalized messaging, which was working better.
So, we needed to craft a new homepage entrypoint would be even more successful at getting users into the more personalized wizard experience.
We hypothesized that the design solution needed to be more visually engaging and higher on the page. I workshopped two solutions in close collaboration with our UX researcher and design director to put into UXTweak:
A sentence-like flow with dropdowns, allowing the user to select their specific preferences
An exploratory set of buttons by media type users could click into, allowing them to find the wizard in their browsing experience
After testing on UXTweak we found that the buckets performed better; it required less effort and encouraged more open-ended browsing.
Once we agreed on the bucket direction, I workshopped the visual design with my manager, exploring icons and color variations.
The final design has increased clicks to the subscription funnel by 3x across 200K monthly users.
Increasing Clickthrough to the Subscription Funnel from the Review Pages by 50%
Lead Product Designer
Team: Product Manager, VP of Brand, UX Researcher, Copywriter, Engineers, Stakeholders from Editorial
The age-based media reviews are Common Sense’s highest-trafficked product experience, bringing in over 8 million monthly users.
During a redesign I led of these media reviews to improve engagement (which I wrote a case study about here), I worked closely with the UX researcher and marketing team to identify places where we could add contextual entry-points to the subscription funnel. I also contributed copywriting.
After the redesign, clickthrough to the subscription funnel from the review pages increased by 50%.
Originally, the review page had 2 successful entrypoints to the subscription funnel, both designed to be relevant to the users’ needs at a particular point in their experience.
One was straightforward: If a user tried to read more than 3 reviews, a “gate” would appear asking users to subscribe. This was by far the most successful conversion tactic.
The second was a more subtle contextual call to action: While a user was reading about violence in a particular movie, they would see a small message saying: “Did you know you can flag iffy content? Adjust limits for Violence & Scariness in your kid's entertainment guide.” This was working very well too, so we explored more options like this.
Since a popular feature of the subscriber experience was to suggest media based on users’ streaming services, we added a CTA into the part of the review page where users would look for streaming services that said: “Want more movie suggestions? Add your streaming services.”
Another popular feature of the subscriber experience was to suggest media based on topics, like “Princesses” or “Courage.” We added a CTA into the part of the review page where users would look for topics, saying: “Want suggestions based on your kid’s interests? Get personalized recommendations.”
Finally, since we knew users engaged highly with our editor recommendations, we added a third CTA geared more towards open-ended browsing.
After the redesign released, clickthrough to the subscription funnel from the review pages increased by 50% across 8 million monthly users.
Improving Sign-Up and Onboarding for Educators
Lead Product Designer
Team: Product Manager, UX Researcher, Product Marketing, Copywriter, Engineers
Common Sense Education’s sign-up and sign-in flows were clunky and needed work.
From the first sign-up page, 75% of users dropped off before finishing. The page wasn’t streamlined, and it was off-brand and outdated.
If a user was attempting to sign in to an existing account (which was often needed to access educator resources), they would be directed to a new page for sign-in. When finished, they would be directed to the site’s homepage, which overall made for a frustrating experience.
I led a redesign to make both experiences more streamlined, welcoming, and on-brand.
The new design had the sign-up process on one page, streamlining the experience and reducing the mental load on users. We also updated the form experience to be more accessible and user-friendly.
As part of the redesign to make signing up more streamlined, we took some questions out of the form and moved them to an optional onboarding flow that would appear after signing up.
More Growth Projects
I also created a user journey map of the entire subscriber experience to clarify user pain points, identify opportunities for improvement, and drive alignment within the subscription product team, in close collaboration with the UX researcher. The map helped the team roadmap successfully and make impactful product improvements.
I also workshopped and designed many entrypoints for Common Sense’s newsletters across both the parent and educator products, in collaboration with the products’ respective marketing teams.
If you’d like to see samples of those, please contact me.