EHR Sign Up

PLATFORM growth through strategic design

Building a better first impression

If you grew up in the 80s like me, you might remember a certain hair care commercial that impressed a very critical lesson: You never get a second chance to make a first impression.

Those ad folks were really on to something. The moment a customer first interacts with your product forms their impression of who you are and what you might have to offer. If you miss the boat in those initial interactions, you might lose them.

In 2019, after transitioning from a free to a paid product and completing a full rebrand, we turned our attention to our customers’ first impression of our product: our trial sign up experience.

The opportunity

Choosing an electronic health record (EHR) app is a complicated and time-consuming process for a healthcare practice. It’s a huge investment, so customers want to be able to try out what they might be buying. When we were a free product, it was easy for people to try us out for a while to see if we were the right fit. There was no commitment required — customers could just sign up and almost immediately start using the EHR to see patients. Once we moved to a paid subscription, however, the stakes were much higher. We needed to get customers into the 14-day trial experience smoothly and quickly so that they would have the time to vet our EHR, talk to a sales rep, and decide if they wanted to make the investment in Practice Fusion.

We hadn’t focused on our sign up workflow since 2015; it hadn’t been a priority for the business. Moving to a subscription model, however, was a massive sea change in how we approached our business and our customers — if we wanted to ensure our success, we needed to turn our attention to how effective we were at getting people through the front door.

Getting to the root of the problem

In collaboration with the Sales and Marketing teams, the Design & User Research team engaged in a comprehensive analysis of the trial sign up user experience and sales cycle to better understand the issues we needed to address.

Our product analytics tool, Mixpanel, showed us that the overall sign up workflow success rate was low, and there were huge drop-off rates in some of the most critical steps, like two-factor authentication and accepting the application terms. We also knew from our sales team that too much of their time was being spent sifting through duplicate accounts — people who were trying to join an existing account were accidentally creating their own new account.

Making the case

To prioritize this workflow on our product roadmap, I led our cross-functional team through the process of demonstrating the business impact we could make with a complete overhaul of sign up. We analyzed data from Salesforce, sales rep productivity, and Mixpanel; and we developed a clear set of objectives and KPIs primarily based on the cost of delay in addressing the most pressing workflow issues. Based on all of that data, we developed a predictive ROI model to help us drive the project forward.

Our approach

Getting this work prioritized on the roadmap was a challenge. Using our business case as a framework, I advocated regularly with our leadership team to underscore the value of the redesign, and I worked with the VP of engineering to determine the right phased approach that could help us make incremental progress. If we could demonstrate high impact through a small amount of effort, we’d have an even stronger case to move the full redesign forward. So, we approached the project in two phases: 1) mobile bug fixes; and 2) mobile-first sign up workflow redesign.

Our team consisted of a senior product designer, senior UX researcher, lead UI developer, program manager, and myself. I worked very closely with the designer and researcher at each step in the process to prioritize our efforts, review and test designs, ensure quality implementation, and track analytic data over time in Mixpanel.

Phase 1: Fast Impact with Mobile Bugs

Our analysis revealed that mobile had the most egregious issues in the sign up workflow, most of which were bugs that could be easily fixed. For example, the 83% drop-off rate at two-factor authentication on Android was caused by a bug that blocked users from entering a phone number for 2FA; and the 66% drop-off rate in accepting terms on iPhones was a result of the terms screen being inaccessible on mobile. After resolving these issues, we improved the drop-off rates of the Android 2FA step by 42% and the iPhone terms acceptance step by nearly 58%. Fixing the bugs in this first phase of work helped us increase our overall conversion rate by about 12% in just a few months. We were nearly halfway to our goal of a 25% lift. Now we were in business.

Phase 2: long-term impact with sign up redesign

With the success of our bug fixes, and the coordinated work of cross-functional team, we were able to get the full redesign prioritized on the roadmap. This phase focused on three key areas to support our business and customer objectives:

1. Focus on mobile. About 35% of customers were signing up on mobile, but the experience hadn’t been optimized for phones.

2. Streamline steps. It took about 10-15 steps to get started with a trial experience; we needed to refine that process and hone our content.

3. Reduce duplicate accounts. The “join a practice” workflow was hard to access for customers; we needed to better integrate it into the overall workflow.

With our core design principles as a guide — simple, focused, and trusted — our lead product designer and UX researcher worked closely together to develop a set of designs for the end-to-end workflow. The new design was infused with our updated brand identity and voice. It also placed the “join a practice” workflow in a clear and accessible location. We tested the designs in two rounds of concept tests internally and with external customers, and one round of usability testing once the updated workflow was implemented.

The outcome

The sign up overhaul took about 10 months from planning to full implementation and release to customers. Through careful planning, seizing opportunities to make incremental impact over time, and strong cross-functional collaboration, we demonstrated the measurable impact of investing in a more streamlined and efficient design informed by data and the expertise of our customer-facing teams.

Through our effort, we improved the experience for our potential customers and delivered real business value by increasing our sign up conversion rate by 32% in just under a year, and completely eliminating the issue of duplicate accounts.

Thank you for fixing sign up! The number of duplicate accounts created by people trying to join an existing practice has been dramatically reduced the updated design. You’ve pretty much solved that problem. — Sales Representative

Ultimately, the new sign up workflow is a clean, efficient, mobile-first design that supports our brand, our business, and our potential customers. We exceeded both key objectives by the end of 2020, and we continue build on that success by staying close to Mixpanel and sales data to help us continue to evolve and refine the workflow.