U.S. News Education connects students with the 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.
Using my findings from the competitor analysis, and taking into account product requirements, I determined 3 main recommendations:
1 . Make the user flow actually flow
The competitor analysis revealed that in general, there are 3 main parts to a typical account creation flow: sign-up (with email), onboarding/info collection, and post sign-up. We had the pieces, but didn’t present them in a linear or cohesive way, causing a disjointed experience. I proposed connecting the dots.
2 . Visually match the Authentication and Account Completion processes
In the spirit of creating a more cohesive experience, I also wanted to make the visual design elements consistent between Authentication and Account Completion.
3 . Overhaul the Account Completion experience
In order to make our accounts valuable as leads, we needed to collect more information from users at sign up. That meant including more fields in Account Completion, and getting users to actually fill them out. The product team provided a long list of fields to include, so I suggested dividing them into multiple steps to reduce mental fatigue.
With help from the development team, we determined that customizing the Authentication step for the Education site would be unfeasible because it had to share implementation with the rest of the company. We decided that for now, simply redirecting users from Authentication straight to Account Completion would be a good compromise to streamline the signup process.
I pulled in the applicable components from our design system to create a first round of designs.
I received feedback from the product team to make the designs more fun and to possibly add a gamification element. One challenge of working at U.S. News is knowing how to balance fulfilling vertical-specific design needs while staying within the boundaries of the site’s global design guidelines, so I had to do some thinking…
After some digging, I found a few elements in our existing design system that I was able to combine, and created these more visually engaging mocks. The main updates were:
Added a light blue gradient background and playful icon imagery
Divided the questions across more screens so that no one screen would have too many fields
Shortened the questions, made them more prominent to simulate a quiz
Once these designs were approved, I set up a handoff meeting to explain the designs and functionality to the engineering team. I worked closely with developers throughout the development process, answering questions as they came up and doing multiple rounds of QA tests.
Within 1 month of launching, Education account signups increased by 40%! The whole team was surprised because users had to fill out nearly triple the number of fields, and yet signups were increasing. That just goes to show the power of a good user experience.
What I would do differently next time
Unfortunately, this project did not include user or usability testing outside of our internal team. For future projects, I would approach the early stages differently by advocating for research and being more proactive about creating a project roadmap for timing purposes.
Looking to the future
The Education vertical still has a ways to go to become the enrollment solution they strive to be, but this new sign-up process was a good start that allows for more opportunities to optimize the lead funnel.
