In 2018 the company put a laser focus on growth and aquisition. Although that effort was a success, the “address capture” rate tanked to the lowest it had ever been. This was a problem because when a new member doesn’t have an address on file, they can’t be paid—even if there’s a balance.
To protect Rakuten from fraud, a mailing address was required before sending members money—they could choose to recieve a digital payment instead but only after entering a valid mailing address. The goal of this initiative was to improve the “address capture” rate overall.
As Product Design Lead, I was responsible for the holistic audit, user research, userflows, visual design, and design-to-dev handoff. I partnered with a Product Lead, a Development Lead and a team of engineers for iOS, Android, and web.
UX Audit
Ecosystem Mapping
User Research
Competitive Analysis
I try to lead every project along the traditional “research, design, validate, iterate” approach. However, I also believe that each project has its own unique situation that requires the traditional framework to be customized to fit. This project followed the following general framework:
Survey the Landscape
I first interviewed stakeholders from the business, business intelligence, security, and engineering teams to understand the internal landscape.
Audit the User Experience
I then did a full audit of the user experience on all platforms—desktop, mobile-web, iOS, and Android—to understand what was working and what was not working before developing hypotheses.
Design & Validate
Finally, I conducted user studies and competitive research to test my hypotheses and design concepts before recommending changes.
Who are the users?
Existing members who have signed up for Rakuten but who haven’t added a mailing address yet.
What are our constraints?
Rakuten offers new members a generous sign-up bonus. To prevent fraud, Business Intelligence and Finance required the mailing address to prove the member’s identity.
Additionally, Business, Search Engine Optimization and Marketing teams were adamant about not requiring a mailing address at signup or to activate members’ accounts.
What are our goals?
Our squad/pod team was tasked with “fixing” the address problem which stood at 20% after 7 days of sign-up—historically, it hovered around 30%.
We gave ourselves the goal of improving that number to at least 60% by the end of the year.
The audit highlighted three areas to focus our efforts.
Sequencing
There were quite a few user touch points and internal factors contributing to the problem. Sequencing the work strategically was an up front focus to ensure success within our project timeframe.
UX on the Address Form Itself
Competitive research showed that the form design was far behind most contemporary models.
Timing
Once the existing touchpoints were addressed there were obvious missing gaps in the core userflow that we needed to fill.
Considering how massive the initiative was, we wanted to take a holistic approach for maximum up-front gains.
We first looked at how to improve the existing entry funnel beginning with the most effective entrypoint—which was targeted emails.
One revelation of the audit was that there were multiple security “checkpoints” a user had to clear before setting their address. This was due to an overabundance of caution with respect to data security & privacy from those respective teams over the years.
We partnered with the security stakeholders to find a solution that minimized the friction for the user while still maintaining security. A new set of display logic was developed called Ghost Authorization where we bypassed the initial sign-in screen if the user was using the same device that they had created an account on. Additionally, we removed the account verification step if the user was inputting an address for the first time—the verification step would be a requirement for all subsequent address changes. This allowed us to remove three steps in the process of completing the user's intended action.
The auto-suggest feature removed over half of the form, and reduced the time needed fill out the form. Additionally, the design system created parity across screens, reducing dev time for future improvements on the form.
The figure to the right is a screengrab of the dev handoff specs crafted on Figma.
A competitive analysis demonstrated that our address form was far behind most contemporary leading products.
I used this comparison to compel my product and engineering partners to add an auto-suggest feature to meet this new industry baseline.
We added an new entrypoint to the address form with the reduced security setting to a new timely point - post-purchase.
Adding this touchpoint at this point in the purchase flow increased conversion by 31%.
An adjacent project team was introducing a new technology- Fillr for autofill. We partnered with that team to enhance that feature to pull the autofill address and port it into the main account.
Over the course of 6 months the combined impact of all the features in this initiative surpassed our target metric generating 65% address capture rate after 28 days* of sign-up.
*users who signed up and added a valid address within 28 days of that sign-up date were counted in this metric.
Mocks shown here are on the mobile breakpoint. The new design was made to be responsive across desktop and mobile-web.
