Kickstarter Guest Pledging

March 2017

Status: Shipped ✅
Role: Lead Product Designer
Collaborators: 1 Product Manager, 1 Engineering Lead, 6 Engineers, 1 Data Scientist, 1 Copywriter
Platforms: Web and Mobile Web
Press: “Introducing Guest Pledging”
Link: Kickstarter

Context around team

Upon joining Kickstarter, I was placed on the Backing feature team, leading all product design efforts for the group. The Backing team was resposible for the “holy grail” Project page, Rewards selection flow, Checkout page and Thank You page. So, essentially the flow in which a user backs a project.

Our primary goal/metric as a team for the company had always been to improve conversion, amongst other smaller metrics such as engagement and timespent on the site. In this particular project, we were directed to find some of the bigger holes in the backing flow that were preventing our users from supporting a project.

Customer problem

Supporting a project on Kickstarter used to mean that new users had to register for a Kickstarter account, which may have been a hurdle for some new backers. We dug into the data and found that the biggest drop off point was exactly that hurdle.

The biggest drop off point was right after a user selected the reward on a project and landed on the login screen. It makes sense. Our average backer on Kickstarter only backs somewhere 1-4 projects a year. Why would someone need to have an account, have to remember the password, etc?

We began to map out the clearest solution to this customer problem. I created user flows to help our engineers and stakeholders understand which steps our users would have to take to fulfill a Guest pledge:

Validating the right solution

Our first stage of research was qualitative. We brought in folks from Craigslist that have said they have never used or backed a project on Kickstarter before. We let them browse the site and analyzed their behaviour. Most of them displayed hesistancy around creating an account and preferred using a Guest pledge route. Also, most of them said they would eventually create an account if they came back often after getting to know the site better. These validated all our assumptions around the drop off point in the conversion funnel.

Next, we began conducting a lot of market research and best practices around Guest Checkout, we came up with two solutions we felt strongly about. So we decided to put it to the test.

• Test A: a side by side approach of both Guest and Login/Sign Up shared the same affordance on the screen (for mobile it was stacked with Guest prioritized).
• Test B: a collapsed view of Login/Sign Up, prioritizing the Guest pledging. The assumption here was that if the user has an account the likelihood of them already being signed on is high, and even if the user happens to type in their e-mail in the Guest form, we would trigger an error and let them know an account already exists under that address.

After A/B testing both options for a few weeks, it was clear option A was the best option. We saw an uptick on both in terms of users continuing to go through the funnel, but option B hid the Sign Up / Login and our signups went down significantly.

Completely neglecting Account Creations was not our goal for this project. We wanted to serve this new base of users but also giving them the opportunity to sign up in the future if they saw value in our platform. Re-designing the Thank You Page for Guest Backers was part of introducing value:

The intention behind this brand new Thank You page was clear. It reflected the original purpose of the project. Allow signing up to a new platform be an after thought of the user. Allow the user to go through the flow of seeing the value of a platform then hit them with an easy to fill out sign up form. Don't make the user give out information if they don't see the value yet.

We also introduced a new Activate Account page. This page was used for when a Guest Backer tried to access features where only Kickstarter users could access. This encouraged guests to see the full benefits of having an account.

Final Thoughts

One of the best things about supporting creators on Kickstarter is getting a behind-the-scenes look at the project as it takes shape, and Guest backers get to follow along like anyone else. In addition, they’ll receive creator messages, project updates, and reward surveys like all backers.

With the concept of Guest Pledging, people who choose not to create an account now had the option to pledge as a Guest, giving creators the opportunity to reach a whole new audience of supporters. It was a small yet powerful change in our system.

I never got a hold of the specific conversion improvement but Sevi, our data scientist on the Backing team presented at All Hands sometime after we launched Guest Pledging, reporting we had improved conversion significantly in the top of the funnel. Our bounce rate from the Sign up / Guest Pledge page was at an all-time low. It was a huge win for the team and company.

Go try it out on www.kickstarter.com now!