Redesigning GoGrid's Secure Sign Up Process

GoGrid made their money by providing self-service IT infrastructure in the cloud. Their 'bread and butter' was customer registration or the "secure sign-up" form. The gist was, ‘get the customer to sign on with discount incentives and trust that their use of GoGrid infrastructure will grow as their business does’. And for a time it did. But competition from the likes of Rackspace, Softlayer, Firehost,…etc and the ever growing giants; AWS, Google and then Azure – left the little guys no option but to change, go out of business, .. or in our case have a fire sale. Before our sale, we noticed via Google Analytics’ that our signup process (GoGrid SecureSignup) was not being completed. Sign-up incompletions and drops offs were outnumbering registrations in a worrisome manner. Hardly surprising, ...our sign-up process was cumbersome and more than a little security paranoid. Initially, there were good reasons for that paranoia. However, as you can see, it was implemented poorly and with little or no user centered design :-

So, it's easy to appreciate how a potential GoGrid customer might not complete registration without a substantial discount incentive (Promo Code field, Slide 1, above).

The sign up process was always tied to an order, even when it was for a free trial. It was too long and too focused on GoGrid's objectives rather than the users expectations. In a nutshell, it had too many Business model goals and not enough customer focus :

If a potential registrant did not complete the registration process, GoGrid wanted to capture the bare minimum pertaining to the customer from the first webform above. This information would be written to a Pardot pre-sales lead qualification database for follow-up. After qualification it would be propagated to SalesForce as a lead. Fortunately, from past experience with Drupal, Pardot and SalesForce integration projects, I know what Pardot and SalesForce need by way of bare minimums in order to create these leads. Zuora tie-in could come later once the customer was actually authenticated and within the Portal because this is when they will actually fire up a cloud instance. Entering payment information had no place in signup. So, with my internal stakeholders satisfied the issue became; how can we simplify this signup process for the customer? As it turned out, very easily. Ostensibly, get the bare minimum from a potential customer so that they are signed up. 'Incentify' them to continue by registering them quickly and showing them the way to login to the Portal and get started. Then when they choose to launch a cloud instance or purchase another GoGrid Service, request payment information at that time only. The most significant facet of this approach is reducing the barrier to entry(registration) and actually dropping the end user where they expect to be dropped - within the portal where they can actively participate in GoGrid's cloud infrastructure. So, the sign up process was reduced to:

The revised signup form is basically the porch to the portal. The front door is the login you are rendered once you've signed up. Both forms employ a two column bootstrap layout. This means they are responsive to the media used to view them and would degrade gracefully upon a tablet or smartphone by wrapping the second column (on the right hand side) under the webform/login.

The promocode field in the old signup was always on display. This led to frustration for customers who did not have a discount code. In the new incarnation, the promocode was shown only when the AdWord or URL the customer employed, contained a discount query string. I achieved this using a simple show/hide snippet of jQuery as follows:

The overall "win-win" in this redesign is that the customer gets to where they expect to be after only a few form fields versus many webforms and time outs which seem very non customer-centric. Meanwhile, GoGrid gets any lead information they might be fearful of missing if registration is not completed.