U.S. News Education connects students with educational programs, serving roughly 8 million monthly users. As the sole designer, I led the redesign of the account sign-up experience, resulting in a 40% increase in account creation and nearly tripling average data points per account (from 3.7 to 11) within one month of launch.
Objective
Redesign the account sign-up flow to increase account creation and capture richer user data, enabling more personalized student experiences and higher-value leads for partner institutions.
Solution
A quiz-style onboarding flow that transformed a standard form into an engaging, multi-step experience, increasing completion while collecting significantly more user data per account.
Team
Product Designer (Me), Product Owner, Developer
Tools
Sketch, Invision, Miro, Jira
Timeline
Oct 2021 – Apr 2022
At the time, U.S. News Education was evolving from a content destination into an enrollment solution - one that would actively connect students with the right schools, and schools with the right students.
To get there, the product team recognized that understanding who their users were was the critical first step. Better user data meant a more personalized experience for students, and higher-quality leads for the schools purchasing that data.
Account creation was identified as the primary vehicle for collecting that data - which is where this project began. In our kickoff meeting, the team aligned on three main objectives for the redesign:
Increase the number of accounts created
Collect richer user information to enable personalization and improve lead quality
Be transparent about the site's goal of connecting students with schools, building trust with both sides
Education leads funnel. This project focused on the starred questions.
The Education site's account creation flow had two distinct parts:
Authentication: Creating a general U.S. News account
Account Completion: Setting up an Education-specific profile, where users filled out personal information
Issues with the existing sign-up experience
To understand what was and wasn't working, I conducted a heuristic evaluation of the existing flow. Two issues stood out immediately:
A disjointed handoff between Authentication and Account Completion
The visual styles were inconsistent between the two steps, and after Authentication, users were dropped back to wherever they were on the site rather than being guided forward to Account Completion
A format that wasn't built to scale
Account Completion used a checkout-style page layout that felt misaligned with the goal of creating a profile. It also left no room to grow - adding the additional fields the product team needed would've made the page overwhelming.
To understand how others were solving this problem, I audited the sign-up flows of 19 competitors, organizing my findings into a comparison framework across four key dimensions: when profile info is gathered, what fields are collected, how info is presented to users, and where users land post sign-up.
Drawing from the competitive analysis and product requirements, I developed three core recommendations for the redesign:
1 . Create a cohestive end-to-end flow
The competitive analysis made clear that effective sign-up flows follow a logical three-part arc: authentication, onboarding, and a post sign-up destination. We had all three pieces - they just weren't connected. I proposed restructuring the experience to guide users through each step in sequence, rather than leaving them to find their own way.
2 . Unify the visual language across both steps
Authentication and Account Completion felt like two different products. To create a more seamless experience, I recommended aligning the visual design across both steps with consistent components and overall aesthetic.
3 . Reimagine Account Completion as a multi-step flow
The product team came with a list of 22 fields to collect at sign-up, varying slightly depending on user type (college, grad, or K-12). Presenting all of these on a single page wasn't an option. I organized the fields into thematic groupings to create a more manageable, step-by-step experience, with the goal of reducing cognitive load and keeping users moving forward.
When I brought a proposal to customize the Authentication step for the Education site, the dev team flagged that it wasn't feasible - Authentication was shared infrastructure across the entire U.S. News platform and couldn't be modified for a single vertical.
Rather than scrapping the idea of a more connected flow, I proposed a workaround: automatically redirect users from Authentication straight into Account Completion, rather than dropping them back on the site. It wasn't a perfect solution, but it meaningfully closed the gap in the experience without requiring a custom build.
With the structure defined, I moved into design, pulling together applicable components from our design system to create an initial round of wireframes that addressed the core flow issues.
Feedback from the product team pushed the designs further: they wanted the experience to feel more fun, with a possible gamification element. The brief was intentionally open-ended, so I had to interpret what that meant within the constraints of U.S. News's global design guidelines - a balance I navigated throughout the project.
Rather than reaching for flashy new patterns, I focused on three specific changes that could work within our existing system:
Reframing prompts as conversational questions: Shifting from form-style commands like "Tell us about yourself" to more engaging questions like "Who are you?" - a small copy change that meaningfully shifted the tone
Limiting screens to 1-2 questions at a time: Creating a sense of pace and momentum that mimicked the rhythm of a quiz
Visual upgrades: To make the experience feel warmer and more inviting
Together, these changes transformed what was essentially a form into something that felt like a conversation.
Once the designs were approved, I led a handoff meeting with the engineering team to walk through the designs, interactions, and intended functionality. From there I stayed closely involved throughout the build, reviewing UAT links shared in Jira, logging feedback in context, and conducting multiple rounds of QA. A few meaningful edge cases surfaced during this phase that required collaborative problem-solving:
Mid-flow drop-off: Since users were already authenticated, we were able to save quiz progress automatically, meaning users could pick up where they left off rather than starting over
Browser back button behavior: We aligned on having the browser back button mirror the quiz's own back button, keeping navigation consistent and predictable
Profile completion nudge: A notification indicator on the profile icon across Education pages gently prompted users who had authenticated but hadn't yet completed their profile
Within one month of launch, account sign-ups increased by 40% and average data points collected per account nearly tripled, from 3.7 to 11. What made this result particularly striking was that users were being asked to fill out significantly more fields than before, and yet completion rates went up. It was a strong signal that the structural and tonal changes to the experience (the quiz format, the conversational framing, the pacing) had meaningfully reduced friction.
What I'd do differently
This project moved quickly and without formal user research or usability testing, which meant design decisions relied on heuristic evaluation and competitive analysis rather than direct user input. In hindsight I'd advocate earlier for even lightweight research - a few usability sessions on the existing flow could have surfaced insights that intuition alone can't catch.
I'd also push for earlier conversations with engineering around long-term maintainability. The custom quiz format was the right call for the user experience, but it introduced technical complexity that wasn't fully anticipated upfront. Evaluating off-the-shelf quiz solutions earlier in the process could have been worth exploring.
Looking ahead
The sign-up redesign was a meaningful step in U.S. News Education's larger goal of becoming a true enrollment solution. By the time I transitioned to a different vertical, the new flow was live and performing well, and while the team continued to iterate from there, this project laid the groundwork for a more personalized, data-rich user experience on both sides of the platform.
