Developer Onboarding - Skillz

FILL THE FUNNEL BY REWARDING CURIOSITY

About Skillz

Skillz is the leading mobile esports platform, hosting casual esports tournaments for 30 million mobile players worldwide and distributing over $60 million in prizes each month. While our consumer arm is the largest and most visible component of the business, Skillz does not create the game content. Instead we rely on 3rd party developers to integrate the free Skillz SDK into their games and gain access to our suite of esports features and unique monetization model. As a PM on the Developer Experience team, my job (alongside my team) was to build products that enticed developers to launch games with our technology and ultimately create successful businesses of their own.

What We Did

We overhauled our new user onboarding flow and as a result dramatically boosted our signups as well as the percentage of those signups that complete the first step of integrating a game. Read on for details

The Problem & Goal

As a company, Skillz was growing exponentially. Our player acquisition and engagement metrics were increasing by whole number multiples, but the developers side of the business was lagging. Monthly developer signups were decreasing, and a drastic solution was needed to quickly rectify the problem.

The goal: Increase monthly developer signups and game integration starts in order to ensure that the sales & marketing funnel remained full with opportunities, ultimately yielding an increase of new games launched on platform.

Requirements & Design Principles

The act of signup had to be frictionless
The Skillz Value Proposition needed to be front and center to encourage new users to create an account
Post signup - the recommended course of action had to be clear and understandable in order to entice developers to begin a game integration and try out our technology

Fixing the signup flow

Right away, we knew we needed to cut all but the most essential fields on the initial signup form. Prior iterations of the signup form were over 10 fields long. We decided to cut that down to 2 (email and password) with an auto-populating country selector for GDPR compliance, and move the outstanding fields downstream into various parts of the integration guide (read here for how we improved lead qualification with smarter collection of this data). This immediately had a positive effect on reducing mental overhead for new users who were still unsure of what Skillz was and if they were interested in “purchase”

Second, to reduce clicks required to signup, we added a copy of the signup form directly within the landing page.

Third we completely redesigned the landing page. Heatmaps of the existing landing page as well as results of various email campaigns had shown us that demonstrating the value of the product through key metrics (like revenue and retention) was highly effective in converting signups. So we decided to include core KPIs as the first section users see below the hero image and place all auxiliary content below that.

Landing Page

The redesigned landing for developers.skillz.com - The KPI cards were inentionally placed above the fold to draw the eye towards the immediate value prop of our Product

Sign Up Form

This sign up form was the destination of the CTA in the header of the landing page, which persisted above the user’s horizontal scroll. If the user scrolled below the in-page signup form on the landing page, or clicked the primary CTA on mobile, this was the result

Making it easy to start a game integration and get into the technology

After signups, the next KPI in the funnel critical to measuring our success was the number of game integrations started. In order to gain access to our SDK as well as begin a guided walkthrough of how to install and set it up, users first had to tell us a little bit about their game. In line with previous design decisions, we moved the collection of this data into a modal that triggered after a user clicked the primary CTA of the page.

This modal collected the information we needed to instantiate their game object and personalize their experience. My designer created beautiful and lightweight single select buttons that we leveraged in replacement of radio buttons or drowdowns, enabling us to go with an icon-forward approach that reduced eyestrain and delighted our user testers.

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End Results

We deployed the new signup flow on June 28th, and immediately Signups grew by 10x as seen by this chart here. When we implemented the new modal to capture game information in November, we increased the percentage of new users who began integration from 13% to 39%. Overall the project was a huge success and we shipped a massive boost to top of funnel metrics.