The Roku Channel Sign Up
Reducing friction leading up to a free trial or purchase
The Roku Channel's content partner landing page is their digital storefront of their subscription offerings. It enables content discovery and a customer can start a subscription. While various areas of the subscription sign-up flow needed improvements, data analytics and user research revealed improvements to the content partner page when selecting a subscription plan. To lower the friction leading up to a free trial or subscription purchase, my team and I worked closely with cross-functional leads to update the sign up flow.
Free trial starts
Roku Pay conversions
Annual revenue boost
Funnel drop off
From funnel data, within a four-week period, 450K initiated the sign up flow per month. However, only 17% subscribed due to a drop-off early in the funnel.
Design template limitations
As our partners develop and diversify their subscription offerings, our current design has found it challenging to accommodate a wide array of subscription products and upsell scenarios. This issue is particularly evident with sports partners, who offer a variety of plans, including seasonal subscriptions, multiple annual billing options, and sports package bundles.
Partner landing page layout shifts user behavior from purchase to browse
In user studies, high-intent customers were distracted from the visually compelling rows of content below the subscription plans. The layout of the partner landing page shifted customers mindset from making a purchase to browsing, interfering with their primary goal to watch a specific piece of content.
A review of web paywalls across the media industry was performed to examine a variety of platforms from video and music streaming services to news publishers. This exercise found a common trend towards using a fullscreen layout that presents each subscription plan with a card component.
Following the collection of quantitative data and user research insights, we set out to achieve the following:
1. Partner landing page layout shifts user behavior from purchase to browse
In user studies, high-intent customers were distracted from the visually compelling rows of content below the subscription plans. The layout of the partner landing page shifted their mindset from making a purchase to browsing, interfering with their original goal to watch a specific piece of content in the discovery and define stages.
2. Reduce number of steps to play content after purchase
Customers come to a subscription service sign-up with some enticing content in mind. After a user successfully started a free or trial or subscription, they were redirected to the partner page. The flow logic didn't consider the users context before the subscription sign up process. This resulted in additional steps (and frustration) for the user to get to their goal of playing a specific piece of content. After subscribing, users expected the content to play immediately.
3. Design systems fragmentation decreased predictability and trust
The web subscription flow relied on two web design systems built by independent teams. The authentication and checkout process (sign in, account creation, and review order) used different design components and color palettes from the consumer-facing discovery and search screens. Users felt the sites use of colors, layout, and font choice to communicate the terms of sale effectively felt disjointed and low quality.
Current design: Most partners use the single plan layout, but the adoption of the multi-tier layout increased in the past year.
After considering multiple proposals, we narrows on two design approaches that we believed would meet our project objectives and achieve the desired results. These proposals were further user tested.
Mobile web versions
Localization
Further modifications to the designs were made to handle languages in Latin American countries, Canadian French regions, and the UK.
We successfully rolled out the new design to all 60+ partners offering multiple plans, leading to a more streamlined sign up flow and an increase in annual revenue.
Now that the flow was shortened and design framework has been established, we will continue A/B testing and iterate. These include:
