Diagnosing a 40% sign-up drop-off, end to end
5 min read
Archistar is a proptech SaaS platform that helps property and governement professionals find, assess and approve sites
My Role
Sole designer on the project — owned UX research, design, and testing end to end.
Team size
Head of Marketing, senior developers, myself.
Timeline
1 month
Archistar pivoted to a free subscription model in 2022. The brief was to design a new pricing plan experience — on the website and in-platform. But pricing sat at both ends of a longer journey: a user hit it on the website before sign-up, and again in-platform after. Looking at what connected those two points is what surfaced the real problem.
Find and assess property
Digging into Heap funnel data on the free sign-up flow, showed drop-off as high as 40% after email entry — nearly half the funnel stalling at the first real commitment point. That wasn't part of the original brief, but it was clearly the bigger issue, and I pushed to expand scope to include it rather than ship a pricing page in isolation and leave the leak downstream untouched.
With no time or user pool for formal interviews, I ran a Fullstory review instead — screened recordings of 10 new sign-ups. The pattern was fast to spot.
Funnels in Heap showed an unexpected gap between email entry and loading up of the app.
The research showed a sticky mobile experience; fields were too close together and didn't stack into one column keeping users selecting the wrong fields by mistake. Lack of responsive sizing meant cropping of the modal and cumbersome scrolling. Password conditions were poorly communicated, creating a merry-go-round of trial and error and rage clicking. The UI actively blocked completion
Poor responsive design made simple tasks, cumbersome
Looking beyond the UI issues, it was clear why users were falling off after email entry - Users entered their email, verified it, and landed in the app — which read as "done." Instead, they were immediately asked for password, first and last name, phone number, company name and industry before they could do anything. We promised them value, but block it from load-up. The product had already signalled completion once; asking again, past that point, read as broken rather than thorough. That's where the drop-off was concentrated.
This was compounded by poor responsive design, particularly on mobile, where 70% of free sign-ups were occurring.
Poor sequencing misled users to a false finish line
The decisive decision
The fix wasn't to polish the post-entry form, it was to remove the false finish line causing it.
I restructured the sequence so that verification, password and user details were all baked into one transparent flow within the app. No false promises. A clear, transparent path to completion. I also moved the industry selection and company name as optional selections.
By the time a user reached the app, they were actually done, not just verified.
User is never lost or without direction.
The Outcome
Testing — internal, cross-functional, and a small external group with no prior exposure to the product — validated the restructured flow: no gap between perceived and actual completion, a mobile-first stepped layout matching where most sign-ups actually happened, and password/error handling that no longer caused rage-clicking.
Redesigned experience
Pricing block
The redesign was validated and ready to ship, but was shelved when the company restructured around a plateaued user base and reprioritised its product investment elsewhere.