Signup form design service

Productizing Attentive’s Mobile’s in-house signup form design service.

Company

Attentive Mobile

Work Done

UX research, Concept testing, UI design

Timeframe

1.5 months

Stakeholders

Product leads, Product Manager, Engineer, UX Researcher, Client Strategy

Overview

The goal of this project was to explore ways to enable clients to self-serve the design of their sign-up forms. At the time of this project, design was mostly done by Attentive’s in-house visual design team. Working closely with product, engineering, client strategy managers, and visual designers, I explore multiple ideas to productize elements of the design service.

Desk Research

Given a limited amount of time (a month) to work on this project, I chatted with internal stakeholders and looked at how our competitors handled the design of marketing assets for new customers. This allowed me to identify capacity problems with Attentive’s current way of onboarding new clients and identify opportunities to productize the design aspects of onboarding.

Interviews w/ client strategy

I chatted with client strategy managers to understand how they onboarded new clients and position the design service. This uncovered a major problem: While clients loved this personalized service, the team was struggling to onboarding clients fast enough. Our lowest tier clients took ~25 days to onboard.

Interviews w/ brand designers

I chatted with brand designers to understand their process of designing signup forms. This helped me understand how brand designers referenced a client’s website to pull in elements of their brand into the design and implement strategies to keep the design evergreen.

Evaluating current designs

I evaluated signup forms brand designers had previously created to identify any design trends my team could productize. This helped inform my team on how we could take a set of logos, colors, fonts, and images from a client’s website and apply it to different styles in the form.

Competitive analysis

A competitive analysis showed an opportunity to differentiate Attentive from its main competitors by leaning into the concept of creating brand-familiar designs for clients. Drawing inspiration from other design editors, it also identified ideas around using ML and automation to generate designs.

Collaboration with product and engineering

Daily check-ins w/ product and eng allowed us to share learning and align on use cases, success, and requirements.

Lo-fis and user flows

Lo-fi designs helped my team to quickly explore and dismiss new ideas against use cases and engineering risk.

Concept Testing

Concept testing w/ existing clients and non-clients allowed us to measure user confidence and impact of a few ideas the team came up with including scraping client’s websites for brand styles, generating multiple branded themes for clients, and building an editor for clients to design their own templates.

Learnings

Manual design editor as an MVP

Participants are comfortable designing their own signup forms based on experience with other content creation tools and rated tasks related to adding their logo, setting text styles, and styling buttons rated as very easy. This insight was used to inform an initial beta of a minimal form editor.

Investing in design automation

Although participants were comfortable designing their forms, autogenerating the designs for them based on their website would save them a lot of time. Furthermore, providing them multiple color themes and layout options allowed them to spend more time focusing on the strategy of their signup forms.

Educating clients on design strategy

When given multiple design options, participants wanted more guidance on choosing a design based on use case and how their subscribers would interact with the forms.