Ten-X - Auction.com
New Bidder Registration
In US, all bidders for property auctions have to register before they start bidding online or in a physical venue. The process consisted of many steps and questions so it was extremely overwhelming. In summer 2016, we redesigned and launched the new Bidder Registration online process. The new experience is so much easier that our users can't imagine if they had to take the old way again.
MY ROLE
I led the design of the new Bidder Registration Process across Web and Mobile Web since the outset of the project in summer 2016. Up until April 2017, I continued to lead the design effort to evolve and refine the process. Later on, I incorporated the new Auction.com branding into the product.
THE CHALLENGE
Based on search findings, the team realized there were too many friction points and steps for novice buyers to complete the entire Bidder Registration process (including the Sign Up flow).
There were 5 pages with 23 fields in total. The old process often frustrated the end users and it affected the registration rate and bids per asset (BPA) rate in a negative way. To tackle this severe problem, we initiated this project to streamline the entire novice Bank-Owned buyer experience.
Old mobile web experience - Zoom In
Old desktop experience - Zoom In
THE DISCOVERY
By using the ideation sessions to drive our discovery, I identified user major pain points and usability issues with the the stakeholders, PM and researcher. We also brainstormed concepts and potential solutions for some of the issues on the fly.
Everyone in the room took a closer look at the existing flow together. Then I organized and categorized findings. We realized users usually got lost after they went to their email clients to confirm their new accounts. Even if users checked on their emails and came back to Auction.com, they lost the context about the property they were viewing so they would get stuck. The second biggest issue was that users could be drained by the SUPER heavy Bidder Registration page.
Conversion rate decreased as user tried to go through the process. It dramatically dropped on Deposit Information section on the Bidder Registration Page.
The old Bidder Registration page had repetitive accordions and a lot of visual clutter around. As a result, it diminished trust and prevented users from moving forward.
THE VISION
We realized the old process was complex for users to finish. Our vision is to make the process as simple as possible. Through the new Bidder Registration, users would know where they are and feel confident moving forward along the process. when they can complete the process at ease, their confidence level and trust will also raise.
After completing the registration with the new design, users also would be directed straight back to the properties they were viewing so they did not need to search for those properties again. This made the new experience much more contextual and intuitive.
THE EXPERIENCE STRATEGY
I created wireframes and prototypes to illustrate the vision and design principles for the new way of doing Bidder Registration. This helped to evangelize concepts, gain alignment across teams and drive decision making.
In the new experience, users are auto-logged in after sign-up so they can go back to the property page they are looking at immediately without getting lost.
The new Bidder Registration is now a clean and straightforward page. The new design focuses on only the most essential fields (Name, email, password) while still supports the other fields for agent info, broker info and deposit info through the checkbox. We also made the customer support (Chat) very clean yet prominent enough so our users get help effectively while completing the process.
EVOLVING WITH THE NEW BRAND
THE IMPACT
Originally our hypothesis was to increase the bidder conversion rate by +10%.
As we improved the experience from 5 pages, 23+ fields to 1 page, 5 fields. We ended up with +40% lift in the number of bidder registrations, +33% in the number of auction participants, +22% lift in the number of bids placed. This translated to approximately 3 million dollars according to the data analytics team.