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Context

  • Stride had a suite of services for helping self-employed people with their taxes: a deductions tracking app, a customer support team with tax expertise, and a discount for H&R block
  • Stride partnered with Airbnb to offer these benefits to their hosts
  • I designed the signup flow, proposed notifications inside Airbnb's products, and drove a 40% conversion rate in signups

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Challenges

  • Limited time. We had to launch an experience in two weeks.
  • Multiple partners. H&R Block and Airbnb had conflicting requirements and we needed both of them on board with what we designed.
  • Technical ambiguity. We had a very tight timeline and were unclear on what Airbnb could provide us with from an integration perspective.
Diagraming the flow with the product manager helped me tease out requirements where none existed.
I put the key info for the project on a giant sticky note that the whole team could see at any time. Seeing Airbnb’s customer personas, the pages users would come to us from, and my sketches all in one place empowered team members to better critique my work.
Visual QA after we pushed experience to .staging

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Approach

  • Share work-in-progress designs with partners to get them to share unspoken assumptions and requirements.
  • Participate and weigh in on technical implementation conversations so we made user-centric choices. The handoff from Airbnb to Stride had a lot of complex tradeoffs; being in the room ensured that we made choices that honored our users' goals.
  • Do the unglamorous work to maximize ROI. This project required extensive work for our web team. To maximize the ROI for our work, we wanted Airbnb to heavily promote us. So, after core designs were done, I reviewed the Airbnb products end-to-end and proposed 10 places where it would be natural for Airbnb to promote us to their hosts.
  • Empower others to make great decisions. I didn't make this call, but a colleague made the suggestion to remove a standard step in our signup flow. I made sure everyone understood the tradeoffs involved from a user and business perspective. It turned out to be the right call, but most importantly everyone was brought in on what the implications of the decision were before we made it.

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Outcomes

  • 40% of users who clicked on a "sign up" CTA converted to creating an account. This blew away a similar partner experience the team built the prior year that had a much deeper integration with Uber and smashed our expectations.
  • The way I designed and the product team instrumented this flow taught us which value propositions mattered most to users. This gives the team additional product clarity on what to offer partners--and users--in the future.
The landing page. We decided to omit this step--a first for a Stride partner funnel. A colleague made the suggestion to remove a standard step in our signup flow. I made sure everyone understood the tradeoffs involved from a user and business perspective. It turned out to be the right call, but most importantly everyone was brought in on what the implications of the decision were before we made it.
I had users select which value propositions they wanted. I hypothesized that forcing a choice would increase conversion. Please note: illustrations came from Stride's existing library; I am not an illustrator.
Getting users over this hurdle was critical: without an email, we can’t reach them again.
After signup, I indicated the "other ways Stride can help" to non-intrusively introduce users to the full of th product.capabilites
This isn't a state would see, but each value users proposition had own payoff. To simplify life for my web developer, I made a with all the accordion elements expanded. I also wrote all the copy. While marketing ultimately this team, I think it’s important for designers to take a stab at communicating with users. It’s an exercise that forces us to have empathy for users’ needs at a specific moment in their journey.

Takeaways

  • Ask partners a lot of questions! The designer skillset--providing visual guides for what we might build--really facilitates critical partner conversations.
  • Involve stakeholders early to validate technical, business and user assumptions.
  • When the time is short, a cross-functional daily standup ensures the right conversations are happening.

Stride Host Experience

Stride, a series-B startup, partnered with AirBnB to help their hosts file their taxes. How do you structure a user experience from a partner to maximize conversions to your product?

Client:
Stride Health
Duration:
Feb - Mar 2018
Team:
Sole designer. Worked with the Head of Product, a PM, the VP of Design, 2 engineers, 2 support team members, and the Airbnb marketing team.
Platform:
Responsive Web
Live site:
View now

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