Expel Free Trial Experience - Becky Sroufe

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Expel Free Trial Experience

UX & UI Design

USER RESEARCH

USABILITY TESTING

Outcome: Led design efforts for a free trial experience generated $1.5 million ARR and 16 new customers in its first 12 months.
Expel was looking to grow the business and improve sales outcomes
Hypothesis: Offering a free trial would generate more qualified leads and drive increased revenue
Our team partnered closely with sales and marketing to design and launch a free trial experience
We launched an MVP and ran user testing to discover there were some friction points inhibiting its initial usage

Problem

The existing sales pipeline wasn't generating enough new leads

Users

Security-focused external customers looking to reduce security risk and save time

Business Goals

Increase net new leads and ARR
Enable the Sales team with product-led growth tool to improve efficiency

Opportunity & Solution

Discover new ways to help support sales through product-led growth

Created user flows and a service blueprint to help align the team on the overall journey and supporting infrastructure from landing page through sign up to usage
Created visual designs to show what changes the interfaces would need to support updates
Planned and ran unmoderated usability tests covering both product and marketing website experiences, resulting in discovering key user friction points that prevented successful sign up and usage rates
Partnered closely with product management, engineering, marketing and sales

Our Process

NOVEMBER 2022

Partnered with Product Management, Marketing and Sales
Created user flows to align the cross-functional team on the end-to-end trial experience

January 2023

Ran initial usability tests on free trial sign up page and discovered several key undiscovered blockers preventing successful adoption

JUNE 2023

Ran usability test on the marketing product demo and discovered opportunities to reduce unnecessary demo steps by 23% leading to recommended changes to the demo experience that subsequently increased completion and adoption
Ran usability test on marketing sign up page for free trial and discovered several key enhancements that could increase form completion and free trial leads

User Flows & Service Blueprint

Impact: The end-to-end user flow and service blueprint aligned teams across the holistic experience and brought clarity to supportive infrastructure. I led the design of the user flow and service blueprint to provide an effective tool for aligning the team on the holistic experience

Design Concepts

Impact: The designs for the free trial helped drive user clarity, reduce customer time to value, and increased revenue for the company
The following designs showcase some of the updates we made to the existing Workbench experience for free trial customers. This included:

Clear visible information of the status of a customer's free trial within the 14 day experience
Showing the value of Workbench through an example incident finding, which helped show the quick action and insights Expel gives its customers in the event of a security risk
Custom guided walkthrough highlights to help a customer better understand the Workbench UI and security information

Research & Findings

Pre-launch usability study

Impact: This research study helped identify major areas of improvement within the initial free trial MVP experience and enabled significant applicable updates to be made before launch.
I led the planning, research, synthesis, and findings report of a usability study with a goal to learn about overall usability of free trial experience to inform MVP launch.

Post-launch free trial sign up study

Impact: This research study helped identify barriers to sign up for the free trial experience for the marketing team and identified improvements that were made to increase signup success rates.
I led the planning, research, synthesis, and findings report of a usability study and collaborated closely with a cross-functional stakeholder team.

Product demo usability study

Impact: This research study helped reduce steps and increase completion success of prospective customers using the product demo.
I led the planning, research, synthesis, and findings report of a usability study and successfully built a strong partnership with the marketing team from this effort.