To navigate gridlock between Acquisition goals (which urged easy access) and Retention (which demanded customer information) I took the approach of exploring the extremes – what were all the possibilities that we could pursue, prioritize the best ideas from each extreme, and begin testing our best bets against one another?

Design wise - I had a few hypotheses: 

• Shopping is fun, not work, and if it looks like “work” then potential customers won’t be motivated enough to sign up – and it didn’t take a lot of fields to look like “work”

• If customers could “look behind the curtain”, then we wouldn’t have to do as much storytelling in copy – picture is worth a thousand words

• With less copy, fewer words would pack a more powerful punch – so the headline copy mattered as much as the experience design 

The outcome of initial testing was so remarkable that SISU testing became fundamental work in marketing + tech for the next year. In the end, maintaining a barrier to entry proved critical to building customer LTV, but reducing that barrier to a simple flow significantly improved conversions. Initially, building a true peekaboo “wall” (to see what was live today before signing up) was a technology hurtle, so to test, I created a “faux” peekaboo to express the idea of seeing behind the curtain. Once the conversions proved out, investment in bringing it to life was a no-brainer, and you can see that the same basic signup flow I designed a decade ago is still in the same basic form today.