Espresso Guest Conversion
Problem
People are often squeezing gym workouts into tight schedules and need to be able to get on the bike and ride. With an Expresso account, we track all your rides, allowing you to monitor progress, create training regimens, and even compete on leaderboards. Users have to sign up before they ride, or nothing gets recorded. If they’ve never been on the bike, they may miss the signup button and tap to start a ride. Once the ride is over, there’s no call-to-action to create an Expresso account. We were losing users with every ride.
Expresso’s mission is to provide a holistic workout experience from activity and motivation to tracking and competing. There’s an entire off-bike user experience in which you can find community, competition, and motivation through the tracking of progress and earning awards.
These are all things people harness to be successful in their fitness endeavors. However, it’s not easy to tell any of this exists within the Expresso bike experience.
Users could sign up, but only from the dashboard. When a user completed a ride, there was no call-to-action to sign up. They basically had no idea what they were missing out on.
Expresso vision—immersive fitness experience
Research
In reviewing analytics for our members, we saw significant customer loyalty in riders with Expresso accounts. Through user interviews and surveys, it became evident that new and even recurring non-members were unaware that they could even create an account, let alone all the features that came along with it. We also discovered that existing members often forgot to sign in prior to riding, resulting in lost data.
Touchpoint Opportunities
Exploration & Iteration
Initially, I explored the many different ways a user would be able to create an account: from the dashboard, from the HUD, start-of-ride, during-ride, and end-of-ride. I also explored the least number of steps and user input we’d need for account creation. As part of my process, I detailed every single flow and weighed the pros and cons of each.
Although the most intuitive entry point was from the HUD at the end of the ride, this was technically not feasible at the time. So, engineering got to work on making this possible, and we settled on a post-workout call to action that would allow the user to sign up and save the workout they just completed. It also allowed users who forgot to sign in prior to starting a workout to sign in post-workout and save their hard-earned data.
Sign up form
The most cumbersome aspect of creating an account was the number of fields the user had to fill out. This took a precious 1:30-2:00 minutes from their already time-crunched workout. I worked with the engineering team to figure out the minimal amount of information we needed to create an account and save their session data. We realized we could create an account with just an email address. This account creation would kick off an email with a temporary password, giving them back a minute and half of their workout time and allowing them to log in later and complete the sign-up process.
Outcome
This was a really fun project for me to work on as it provided real value and involved a lot of research and detailed interaction work. I learned some important takeaways from this project related to product and business processes.
How to adapt to changing requirements
New timelines, resourcing issues, and reprioritization meant the scope of the project was constantly changing. I had to adapt to those changes and still deliver the best design in time with tight deadlines.
Always fight for good UX
I had to work under very strict technical constraints but still fight for what I believe is essential to having a good user experience. It was important to me that our system do the heavy lifting and make things easier for the user.
Choosing what we won’t do
There were many great use cases we could tackle with a rich feature set. However, some were costly or unrealistic. I had to determine where the real value was for Expresso, so we did not spread ourselves too thin.