UX Improvements That Drive User Action: Optimising Onboarding for Higher Conversions

Role: User Experience Designer

Skills: User research, UX audit, Wireframes, Customer Journey Map, User flows

Timeline: January - March 2023

About Played

Played is a sports participation platform that enables sports providers to create their own digital storefronts to host activities online, manage bookings, communicate with customers, and track analytics. I worked as a sole UX designer in a team of product manager, developers and UI designer.

Understanding business and user needs

  • Played’s value flywheel framework suggested strengthening UX to boost referrals and increase conversions to support growth and continuous product improvement.

  • To further understand user pain points, I combined insights from sales team data, customer interviews, and screen recordings. I also mapped the customer journey, revealing friction points across the onboarding flow.

  • One key finding: creating storefronts required too much information, increasing cognitive load and leading to drop-offs.

Played - Value Flywheel.png
customer journey map.png

What we found

Played’s onboarding wasn’t just long, it actively discouraged completion, thus costing sign-ups and reducing conversions.

Research highlighted three major barriers in onboarding:

• Overwhelming onboarding flow — 67% of users struggled with lengthy steps and lack of clear structure.

• Rigid navigation — users couldn’t move back in the flow without restarting, causing frustration.

• Sign-up errors — 79% of sessions showed failed attempts due to lack of password visibility, leading to drop-offs.

Overwhelming onboarding flow

Rigid navigation

sign up screen

Sign-up errors

I translated research insights into targeted design solutions that simplified the journey and boosted motivation

What we built

Enhance sign-up process by allowing password visibility, adding social sign-in options, and improving microcopy to reduce errors.

Enhance sign-up process by allowing password visibility, adding social sign-in options, and improving microcopy to reduce errors.

Implementing success screens after completing key onboarding steps will provide positive reinforcement to users and avoid abandoning flow.

Implementing success screens after completing key onboarding steps will provide positive reinforcement to users and avoid abandoning flow.

Adding a progress section on the top left of the Activities page will help users to easily navigate back to where they left off, avoiding frustration.

Adding a progress section on the top left of the Activities page will help users to easily navigate back to where they left off, avoiding frustration.

Adding a preview section to help users confirm their selections and make changes, reducing overall time in decision-making and speeding up the onboarding process

Adding a preview section to help users confirm their selections and make changes, reducing overall time in decision-making and speeding up the onboarding process

Screens and interactions

A positive onboarding experience leads to higher user satisfaction and improved retention rates.

Measuring success

While onboarding metrics are still being tracked, usability tests were planned to measure task success, error rates, efficiency, and clarity.

The expected metrics were estimated based on usability best practices, observed user behavior patterns, and benchmarks from similar UX improvements in comparable platforms.