Mitigating risk in the trial experience

Balancing business needs and streamlined usability in the FreeClimb trial experience

 

CLIENT: Vail Systems, Inc.

ROLE: UX Designer, Project Manager

TEAM: 2 software engineers, 1 product marketing manager

CHALLENGE: With new updates—and much higher penalties—to the A2P 10DLC ecosystem in the telecommunications ecosystem in late 2021 and early 2022, the team was required to add additional platform misuse and risk mitigation steps to onboarding, FreeClimb documentation, and the buying and using of 10DLC numbers on the FreeClimb platform. The team knew that this would add additional friction to the onboarding journey especially but that these additional steps were necessary in order to avoid potentially tens of thousands of dollars in fines to the FreeClimb team if our users misused the FreeClimb platform or didn’t provide the proper identification when signing up and receiving one for A2P 10DLC number during their trial period. Therefore, we had to update the onboarding design to include new, required steps for purposes of risk mitigation while also keeping the usability of the experience as friction-less as possible to avoid a drop in new, legitimate sign ups to the platform.

 
 

Solution

For this project, we worked with the marketing, security, and legal teams to gather requirements as each group had their own vested interest in what information we gathered as part of onboarding, including lead generation and platform abuse mitigation—the fees of platform misuse in the telecommunications space alone could be as high as $10,000 per user with the new A2P 10DLC guidelines put into place in 2022. Therefore, we wanted to collect all information required to mitigate this risk to the business while also not hindering actual developers trying to sign up and use the FreeClimb platform.

The solution below represents a flow that achieved all business requirements while maintaining streamlined usability for a regular user, ultimately moving them through required steps with the least amount of friction.

Not pictured as part of this prototype is how we set up users for success during their trial once they had successfully signed up. This included:

  • Updated UX to the buying and selling phone numbers experience to mitigate phone number abuse.

  • Additional email, banner, and links to documentation from the user’s dashboard about updates to 10DLC and how it fundamentally changes how they had heretofore engaged with telecommunications APIs.

  • Automatically giving users one 10DLC number as part of their trial but setting (and informing users of) usage limits in order for them to try out our platform without abusing the 10DLC phone number. We were able to do this from the information users provided when signing up. Previously, users were able to choose what kind of number they wanted to use during their trial depending on their use case and were not required to give us any more than basic log in information. New updates to A2P 10DLC meant that all users during trial periods has to use and abide by 10DLC rules, which included having access to only one number at a time and registering with their real name and real phone number.

Using flow diagrams for impact

This screenshot is just one of many flow diagrams created for the team to understand how to properly structure a FreeClimb trial experience while mitigating risk; in this case, the key problem here was technical—for a trial we are effectively loaning 10DLC numbers to users during their trial. The users do not know this and don’t need to know this. But we need to figure it out on our side to reduce the burden on the user as much as possible. Different flows shown on the right represent different ways a trial could come to an end. Options to the left represent async conversation conducted via FigJam with stakeholders, with final decisions circled in red ultimately informing the flows on the right.

Although the design is simple, the team did a lot of work behind the scenes to balance all the technical and business requirements needed to make this design possible. In order to make this the best experience possible for the user, we as the business needed to decide what issues to solve for the users and which they had to handle themselves. High level stakeholders very concerned about how the onboarding and trial experience needed to change and be properly managed in order to avoid the very serious risk that bad actors had to our platform. And then I and the engineers I was working with wanted to make sure that we created an experience that didn’t burden the users. Therefore, high level stakeholders, including our Head of Engineering, our CEO, and our Head of Marketing, were all part of the technical and UX decision-making during this process. So how did we make decisions, make sure that we had considered each edge case, and decide a final design without getting stuck in the details? Flow diagrams!

A high level view of one of many flows the team and stakeholders used to make technical, business, and UX decisions about each step in the sign up flow.

This screenshot shows and up close look at how the team used this flow to make decisions. This is one of many decision points the team needed to make when restructuring our trial experience. At each step that required a decision from the team, I would identify pros and cons of each option. We discussed as a team and ultimately made a decision together (circled in red).

This is flow diagram method I’ve have used on every design project since to make sure the team is on the same page about technical requirements, user requirements, and total number of steps before even beginning a low fidelity design. It has continued to work well for me by ultimately making sure the team is aligned and focused on each step of the journey before moving on to how that journey actually looks and behaves. It is more work up front but saves the team a lot of time (and headaches) later, ultimately leaving the team with more usable, less risky designs.

Want more details?

Please feel free to send me an email at meganstandrew@gmail.com or reach out on LinkedIn to learn more about this project.