How improving the referral UX activated our flywheel
The Problem
Our product team aimed to increase the number of quality account signups by creating a referral flywheel from existing signers. The team hypothesized that signers could refer potential power users for Notarize. To achieve this, my role was to partner with the product manager and tech lead to improve the referral UX and identify areas for improvement.
You can also view the blog post version I wrote here.
What success would look like:
Signers share their documents via our platform because we’ve communicated the benefits and we’ve made it easier than sending it via email.
The recipient experience is more engaging, increasing the chances that recipients would request a demo or contact sales and/or sign up for an account.
The Referral Flywheel becomes a major source of quality leads for our sales team.
At a glance, here is what we wanted our flywheel to look like
Project Phases
Phase One: Improve the sharing feature
The team discovered that the sharing feature was underperforming. 70% of users were sharing the documents to their personal email, and sharing wasn't presented as an obvious next step.
Previous “Share” UX
Improved “Share” UX (Desktop and native apps)
I made three important improvements to address these issues. First, I made email the obvious next step by presenting the email fields upfront. Second, I added the option to add multiple recipients. Third, I added a line of copy to tell the signer their completed documents will be sent to their email address.
These changes resulted in a 50% increase in non-self shares (business domains), allowing sales to win some new Notarize customers.
Phase Two: Improve the recipient experience
The goal of this redesign was to increase engagement among recipients by increasing the number of recipients who retrieve documents, request a demo or contact sales, and/or signup for an account. I held a cross-functional brainstorm with product, engineering and marketing to get the team in the mindset of the recipients we were targeting and to poke holes in the current experience.
The redesign aimed to answer the following clearly and succinctly: Who is sending these documents and why are they being sent through Notarize? What does Notarize do? Can I trust this email? The results of this redesign are yet to be read.
Updated designs (responsive web)
Outcomes & Next Steps
The first phase of the project was a major success. The new share screen increased non-self shares by over 50%. Using these leads, sales reached out via email and won some new Notarize customers. As for phase two, we still need to read the data on how well the updated recipient experience has performed in terms of engagement.
The next step for the team is to focus on touchless onboarding within the product, cutting down the time spent by sales and support teams to educate new customers. This will ensure that customer activation is as quick and frictionless as possible.