Sports B2C App
Registration and onboarding
Outside is a digital magazine and web platform that covers travel, sports, gear, and fitness and culture of the outdoors. The platform has more than 300 million unique users and over 100 million registered users.
Client
Outside Magazine, US
Services
Product Design Analytics Big Design Systems Collaboration with Developers
Industries
Sports & Outdoors
Date
2024
🚀 Business Need
Outside rolled out several new services and aimed to streamline the registration experience for new users. One of the key additions was the launch of the Activity Feed — a social feature within the Outside Magazine website, similar to Facebook’s feed. Stakeholders aimed to drive traffic to this service, foster community engagement around sports and the outdoors, and encourage user-generated content. At the same time, Outside had acquired several companies offering GPS tools, route planning, and sports tracking services. Highlighting these offerings to registered users became a priority — all in support of increasing sign-ups and driving long-term revenue growth.
📈 Analytics & Strategy
Following the launch of the initial sign-up flow, we reviewed analytics in Amplitude and found that a significant number of users were dropping off. We looked into the existing flow and found that, while it was clear and the copy was solid, the flow was simply too long. With limited time, the PM and I decided to focus on quick wins — small, impactful changes that would improve the user experience without requiring heavy development effort.
👩🏻 My Role
As the UI/UX Designer on this project, I was responsible for:
Collaborating with the Product Manager to define scope, prioritize improvements, and identify quick wins under tight deadlines
Auditing the existing sign-up experience, evaluating UX clarity, copy effectiveness, and user effort across the flow
Facilitating discussions with stakeholders to align on business goals — particularly around user engagement and newsletter visibility
Consulting with the engineering team to assess technical feasibility and confirm which steps (e.g. email verification) could be safely removed or streamlined
Mapping revised user flows and identifying optional vs. essential steps to simplify the onboarding process
Designing lightweight UX improvements that balanced user needs with minimal dev lift
✅ Solution & Outcomes
To identify improvements, I started by aligning with stakeholders, and consulting the dev team on technical constraints. We flagged the “Email Verification” step in the sign-up flow as optional for account setup and consulted the Tech Team to confirm that, from a technical standpoint, the verification screens could be removed.
Since building community and promoting user-generated content were priorities for the Activity Feed from the stakeholders perspective, we kept the “Follow Brands & Authors” step to support engagement and content discovery.
To maintain visibility and engagement with our partner-promoted newsletters—especially without a centralised subscription hub, we also retained the “Sign up for your local newsletter” step.
The final results from Amplitude showed that the goal was more than halfway achieved — user registration completions increased by 11%, compared to the target of 15%.
Completion Rate (expected) | Completion Rate (actual) |
15% | 11% |
💪 Future Improvements
Stakeholders are satisfied with the initial results, and we’re now planning A/B tests using design variations I created to explore further improvements to the sign-up flow. I also proposed additional enhancements, mapped by user value vs. effort:
1. Autofill for input fields — reduces form time (high user value, low effort — a clear win).
2. Replace "Follow Authors/Brands" screens with contextual suggestions in the Feed or at the end of articles (medium user value, high business value, medium effort).
3. Move newsletter sign-up to a dedicated Newsletter Hub for registered users (medium user/business value, high effort).
These changes would reduce the flow from 4 to just 2 screens — improving user satisfaction and driving more traffic to content and services, Outside’s current top priority.