Growth Hacking Referly: New User Onboarding Workflow

Now that we're talking about growth hacking...

Funny thing is the first thing I thought after finishing it was my recollection of their previous landing page where they practically forced me not to give out my email address and how that decision would have impacted the activation rate via proper retention drip email campaign.

To me it felt like they were ignoring a low hanging fruit in their post-registration activation funnel.

Of course it was only after I checked up on their landing page again that I realized they had indeed changed their UX pattern from the previous lazy reg / "instant candy" (ie. letting people just have the URL to share right from the frontpage w/o getting them to sign-up [1]) to the "standard" approach of requiring a sign-up before any gratification.

Not only that by they had also gone quite aggressive with their approach by showing a 0 sec delay dialog box demanding a registration via FB / Twitter.

Would be very interesting to hear how these changes have reflected in their lp conversion rates. Would be especially cool to hear how the controversial pop up is performing for them. It's a ballsy move. Gotta like that. :)

[1] http://refer.ly/blog/referly-homepage-simplification-retrosp...

Since there are so few steps, you could show the current and total number of steps to encourage the new user. (UI pattern ideas: http://ui-patterns.com/explore/collections/steps-left)

You could have the button on step 1 read, "next", since the user might be confused about what a "profile" is at this point.

Does making the user find a link in step 1 push them away from refer.ly and out of the sign up flow? Would the search seen on the homepage be simpler there?

Step 2 could be its own screen (rather than the modal.)

Again, the orange button on step 2 could be "next". I was confused as to what the 2 CTAs did...does "Save to Profile" have a different result than "Skip, I'll do this later"?

I hit the "Skip..." button and didn't see the step 3 modal as pictured in the blog post. Maybe there could be some sort of congratulatory moment there regardless of the path taken where the user is rewarded and welcomed to their new profile showing their first Referly product. Something like: "Good Job! Here's the link you just created on your new profile. A few ideas for what to do next..."

Keep up the good work and thanks for sharing.

The last step in your onboarding is particularly interesting, as you're giving users the option to choose how to proceed after signing up. What made you choose the particular options you did?