Myself and my small design team of 3 conducted research for market fit and competitive landscaping, created the framework for the information architecture, designed Lo/Hifi wireframes, and created a tokenized design system component library.
Below I'll dive into the process of how our work directly contributed to a premium experience for Mode's 40m users and a new stream of reliable MRR for the business.
1 Success metric is hidden for privacy reasons. Impact can be shared upon request.
From a business standpoint, monthly recurring revenue (MRR) is viewed as a golden ticket for technology businesses. It offers predictable, stable relationships with customers. Paid subscriptions also allow the user a choice to invest in a greatly enhanced experience.
Our hypothesis is that if we can offer our earning-focused community a paid experience which pays for itself and then some, that it would be a strong market fit. First, we needed to prove that this service was going to be valuable.
Earn Club is marketed as a paid enhancement for existing users. The subscription perks are meant to directly address existing user feedback, interests, and pain points gathered by us over an 18 month period.
Our user research revealed 3 app enhancements which our users would be willing to pay for:
We additionally enhanced the Earn Club offering with 2 requested fixes to user pain points:
1,2,3Exact data is hidden for privacy reasons and impact can be shared upon request. Numbers from research were considered substantial enough to act on.
New Users: Earn Club is offered at the start of the new user journey as a no-strings free trial to all users. Users can choose to subscribe and redeem their points instantly with a 50% bonus, or downgrade and redeem at the normal rate with a waiting period.
Existing Users: We created a comprehensive trigger strategy for getting the Earn Club trial in front of existing users. We offer a free trial of Earn Club at moments of joy (such as earning X number of points) or moments of frustration (waiting X days for a cash redemption to process). Each trigger is tailored specifically to the user's situation (Ex: Waiting on a redemption to process? Try Earn Club for free and enjoy instant redemptions).
Work sample below: A flow detailing how Earn Club is presented to new and existing users.
A successful user journey is defined as a new or existing user receiving the Earn Club trial, accepting it, and redeeming their bonus points + subscribing at or before the 7 day mark.
The journey is divided into 4 major parts: Onboarding, During Trial, Redeem + Subscribe, and Active Subscriber.
Work sample below: Snapshots of low-fidelity wireframes organized in the 4 major steps of the user journey: (1) Onboarding, (2) During Trial, (3) Redeem + Subscribe, and (4) Active Subscriber
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The design for Earn Club is characterized by the dark red/purple gradient used for backgrounds and headers to make clear the difference between subscribers and free users and is found as a sub-library of our design system.
Work sample below: A selection of primary screens which I designed for the Earn Club experience, from onboarding to trial to full subscription.
The Earn Club trial is offered as part of the onboarding experience for new users and fits between the new user tutorial and onboarding questions used to personalize the experience.
Depending on if the user accepts the trial prior to the onboarding questions, the experience is tailored as such:
Work sample below: Screens from the Earn Club onboarding experience. The regular onboarding screens are tailored to include positive reinforcement for doing the trial.
The in-trial experience is also based around positive reinforcement psychology. When a user takes a positive action, we make an effort to congratulate them and reinforce how much better that interaction was with Earn Club.
For example: A user earns 185 points and sees a "points confirmation" modal, celebrating their earning. The user will also see a breakdown of how the points were earned, and that they got a 50% boost from Earn Club.
Work sample below: Designs for the during-trial experience. Users can view plans, upgrade, and choose to end the trial at the loss of bonus points earned.
Users can redeem their points for cash during or at the end of the 7 -day trial experience. When redeeming, the user also needs to subscribe in order to claim any bonus points they've earned as well as keep any premium perks.
Subscribers also receive $30 in stock, making the 1st year subscription effectively "free" (or at least a 1:1 exchange).
If a user chooses not to subscribe, they can still redeem but will lose out on any bonus points they've earned. To account for fraud, we also created a required facial verification process for free users.
Work sample: Designs showing the 1st time redemption and subscription process for a trial user. A user who does not subscribe can still redeem, but must submit to a face verification flow to ensure they are not a duplicate user or bot.
A subscribed user experience is functionally very similar to the trial experience in that they are positively reinforced anytime they take advantage of subscription benefits.
Some additional subscriber design requirements include the ability to compare plans side-by-side to see what benefits the user will gain or lose by making a change.
Work sample: Screens for the "subscribed" experience. Users at this stage have successfully paid for and subscribed to Earn Club and can view benefits, change, or downgrade their plan.
The full story on the success of Earn Club is still developing. As of writing, this has become a major source of revenue for the business, and is supported by a full product, engineering, and marketing team.
Overall, the process was a huge internal success. We built a totally new subscription service on top of an existing free product while also managing versioning and feature releases in 4 months.
Earn Club is also a win for Mode Mobile - offering a completely new and stable form of MRR. This feature created a major positive and lasting financial impact for the business.
Work sample below: The complete new user flow for Earn Club - A massive Figma file!
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