Evening Standard: Registration flow

My Role

As a publication with a strong brand heritage, the Evening Standard has a large and loyal readership. While many commuters rely on the print edition, the shift to remote working during the Coronavirus pandemic saw a major increase in traffic to the Standard's website.

I was tasked with investigating why our digital registration journey was underperforming and to design a new, higher-performing version – one optimised specifically for mobile users.

Usability Testing

To uncover pain points in the existing registration flow, I conducted a series of usability testing sessions, asking users to complete the sign-up process and verbalise their thoughts.

The original journey involved two steps:

1. An initial page asking whether the user already had an account
2. The full registration form

Most users misunderstood the purpose of the first screen, assuming it completed the process. It added confusion rather than value and was therefore removed. Additionally, benefits of registering were presented too vaguely to drive action. I recommended these be distilled and integrated into the main form more effectively.

Identifying Frustration Themes

During testing, several specific fields emerged as sources of hesitation or confusion:

• Year of birth - users didn’t understand why it was needed
• Gender - many were uncomfortable or unwilling to provide this
• Country of residence - seemed unnecessary without clear justification

To address this, I introduced clear helper and error messaging, explaining the reasons for collecting this data. We also removed or adapted certain fields:

• The “Gender” field was eliminated, with "Title" used instead to infer gender when necessary
• The "Username" field was removed entirely from the registration form, as it was only relevant for article commenting - users would instead choose a commenting name at the point of commenting
• GA data showed few issues with password mismatches, so we switched to a single password field with visible characters, improving simplicity without sacrificing clarity