Software Registration

Software Registration Onboarding

This project highlights my work on the software registration onboarding for the platform service, a crucial entry point for the informatics software suite. As a key step for paid software subscriptions and consumables, it ensures users complete the software setup before they can begin using what they've purchased.

As the lead UX designer, I focused on enhancing the end-to-end experience across multiple touchpoints of the journey. This streamlined the process, reducing the time from purchase to registration, which accelerated product usage and contributed to a higher conversion rate from the 30-day free trial to paid subscription.

Discover & Define

Currently when customers purchase software, they must complete registration (setting up configuration) to begin using it. However, this process often takes too long, sometimes weeks before their team can access the product. For 30-day free trials, the issue is even worse, as delays significantly reduce the trial period, and ultimately leads to a lower conversion rate to paid subscriptions.

To address the registration delays, I first conducted a discovery phase to identify the root causes of the problem. The simplified platform journey I created highlights the key touchpoints affecting the registration process such as, Order confirmation, Login, and the Registration portal.

Once the root causes were identified, I created lean personas to highlight key user groups and their pain points during the software registration onboarding process.

Once the root causes and targeted user groups were identified, I facilitated a design workshop with cross-functional teams, including the product manager, developers, subject matter experts like scientists, and customer support team. The goal was to align on the problems and generate ideas to meet the design goal, "Streamline the registration process through an improved end-to-end experience".

Root Cause 1: Email Communication

The email serves as the initial point of contact. Once the purchase is complete, customers receive the email regarding registration for the first time. However, based on research findings through discovery, I have identified several issues with the current experience that cause delays in taking action.

It was evident that the current email communication was confusing and not serving as intended due to:

Mixed with order confirmation: Including registration instructions in order confirmation emails proved ineffective, as customers perceive them as standard order confirmations. Since the company sells many products that don’t require software registration, the registration details often go unnoticed.
Wrong recipient : these emails were often sent to purchasers (we know from research that purchasers often aren't responsible for registration) leading to the registration details being overlooked.
Poor design and accessibility: The email template was outdated, hurting brand perception with lack of clarity in message and CTA along with the yellow font that failed web accessibility standards.

Additionally, the auto-registration feature (which automatically registers products under certain conditions) caused confusion by sending two separate emails for the same order—one requesting registration and the other confirming auto-registration. The emails also differed in style and language, exacerbating confusion.

To improve the experience, I have taken several steps:

Registration-specific email: I separated registration emails from order confirmations for better clarity.
Targeted recipients: By using a user data model build by registration history, sales team input, and insights from an onboarding survey, I ensured registration details reached the right registrants.
Design enhancement: I redesigned the email template for improved branding, consistency with the design system, and clearer messaging with a strong CTA.

For auto-registration, I consolidated the emails into one, informing users that their order has been auto-registered and providing relevant details. This simplifies communication and improves clarity for users.

As a result, this approach increased initial engagement on the first touchpoint and standardized the email template design for not only registration, but all software-related communications moving forward.

Root Cause 2: Login

When users receive the registration email, they are prompted to click the “Register Software” button, which redirects them to the Software Registration Portal—a web app for completing the process. However, a major pain point was that many users got stuck in the login screen due to authentication failures.

User studies showed that when redirected to log in, users instinctively use their private domain credentials, as their software subscriptions are tied to that domain. However, the Software Registration Portal operates on a separate domain with different login credentials. This leads to failed login attempts, causing frustration and delays in the registration process.

I created this storymap to visualize the current login and signup experience across different personas and user scenarios. It highlights challenges such as creating an account, logging into different domains with separate credentials despite using the same account, encountering different login screens for different domains, and receiving an invitation email to join a workgroup without having an existing account. The overall experience is cumbersome and confusing, making the signup and login process frustrating for users. Contact me for a high resolution image with details of each user scenario.

I created this flowmap to illustrate how the new login experience should function in relation to software registration and beyond. It outlines the use cases for single-domain and multiple-domain users, whether accessing a product with or without direct URL, ensuring a seamless and intuitive experience throughout.

Our long-term vision is to implement a centralized identity and access management system with a single credential for all. In the short term, I designed the unified login experience. Customers are identified by their email as a unique ID and authenticated using any valid password, regardless of domain. Once authenticated, they are seamlessly redirected to the Software Registration Portal via a direct URL in the registration email.

This simpler and cleaner design eliminates friction caused by differing credentials, allowing customers no longer need to worry about distinguishing between domains and credentials for login. Along with the new signup experience, this represented a major brand transformation, impacting not only software users but all customers.

Root Cause 3: Software Registration Portal

Upon receiving the email notification, and successful login, customers are redirected to the Software Registration Portal, where they can configure and register their products in order to begin using them. The current experience lacks clarity in providing registration instructions. This ambiguity could lead to confusion and result in repetitive and time-consuming tasks for their pending orders.

The primary root cause was within the registration software itself due to several issues identified:

Lack of clear guidance: It lacked clear instructions on what the registration entails, what actions users need to take, and how to complete without help documentation for users.
Restricted rules and roles: It forced only specific type of admins to complete the registration, causing confusion for users when different individuals are responsible for the task in their organization.
Repetitive steps: The three-steps process in three pages was unnecessarily complex and redundant as user need to repeat the steps when there are multiple pending orders.

I conducted an onboarding survey to assess whether registration should be limited to specific admins. Results showed 29% of users were non-admins but still handled registration. This led to make informed design decision allowing anyone responsible to register. The survey was also used to build the data model to send the registration email to the right recipients.

Here’s the new design, which streamlined the workflow by making key design changes:

Clear language & CTA: Refined wording to clearly communicate required actions. Contributed to introducing customer-facing help documentation for the first time.
No more restrictive rules: Registration is now open to anyone responsible, leaving it up to customers to assign individuals to complete registration.
Overall design enhancement: Streamlined the workflow by merging three configuration steps into a single page. Applied the design system for visual consistency and an improved user experience.

After the successful launch, I led the design of Connected Home, a unified hub for platform apps, including the Software Registration Portal with a side navigation panel.

Previously, users had to navigate multiple apps—one to register software subscriptions, another to view subscription status, and another to manage access security, creating a fragmented experience. I focused on consolidating these apps into one, refining the information architecture and navigation flow to provide a seamless, all-in-one solution for all platform-related tasks beyond just software registration.

Outcomes

By focusing on the entire end-to-end experience holistically and taking an incremental approach with a solid strategy, I helped customers streamline their registration process, leading to numerous benefits.

Through UX improvements at every touchpoint in the registration and onboarding process—from registration emails and unified login to the new Software Registration Portal, significant impacts were made:

Faster registration: Reduced order fulfillment time (from purchase to registration) by 4X, addressing a long-standing issue that had persisted for years.
Increased software usage sales: Faster access led to more analyses and storage data, driving higher software usage expenses.
Paid subscription conversion: The improvements contributed to a higher conversion rate from 30-day free trials to paid software annual subscriptions.
Major brand turnaround: Collaborated with cross-functional teams to advocate and implement a new email template and login/signup flow, resulting in a major brand turnaround.

With these improvements, we earned customer trust, leading to software subscription renewals and long-term retention as customers continued to grow their businesses using Illumina products and services.

Next: See the software experience once registration is complete in the Microarray analysis setup.