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Across Condé Nast brands—including Vogue, Bon Appétit, The New Yorker, and more—accounts are the foundation for building relationships with readers.
They lead to paid subscriptions, memberships, and return engagement.
My team redesigned the end-to-end sign-in flow to encourage more users to create accounts and increase validated sign-ins.
Challenge
The current sign-in flow that connects all Condé Nast brands was in need of improvement:
Only 25% of users who started registration completed the email verification step and successfully authenticated their account.
The current flow was not GDPR compliant, so it could not be rolled out to our international markets.
The flow was inconsistent across the site and included a number of dead ends
It was a black grey hole! Users were jolted out of the brand’s unique reading experience to enter a grey, brandless series of screens that could feel confusing at best and untrustworthy at worst.
Before the redesign:
Our challenge was to redesign the entire end-to-end experience in order to guide users to complete the authentication process for valid sign-ins, and increase the total amount of registrations on site. To do so, we needed to make the experience as painless and compelling as possible.
The extra challenge: We needed to make one experience work for 10+ recognizable brands with their own sites, styles, and voice and tone.
Before the redesign:
Approach
We broke the massive project down into three discrete workstreams we could chip away at in tandem:
The registration gate
The sign-in flow
Re-entry (landing back on the brand’s site)
Then, we created guiding principles to ensure the design rationale always laddered up to the vision:
Consistent. All users enter and exit through the same core flow no matter their entry point.
Simplified. We remove extraneous flows (sign-in via AOL) and tweak the UX and language based on our current insights.
Contextual. We craft a seamless sign-in experience that maintains the brand feel and keeps users on the same journey.
Then, we kicked off:
Activated a steering committee to tackle the business challenge from a variety of needed perspectives: Consumer Marketing, Legal, Editorial Creative.
Generated two rounds of user research to better understand reader pain points and challenges across the journey, and what might entice them to create an account.
Design Rationale
Registration Gate
Updated confusing barrier logic: When users faced a “gate,” the content behind it was hidden after the first paragraph, but the logic didn’t apply to images. So a user could scroll through images that inadvertently looked like a glitch or blank space and ads. We worked with the Ads and technical teams to update the truncation logic so users understood why they could no longer read the rest of the article.
Fixed language inconsistencies between “subscribe” and “register,” made it difficult to understand what users were being asked to do. We completed an text audit and updated all language for consistency.
Sign-in Journey
The journey was confusing and in research, users reported failing to remember their passwords. We deprecated passwords in favor of a more streamlined, successful option. SSO selections (Google, Apple) were prioritized as the fastest way to sign users in.
The lack of styling on the page was intended to feel brandless—like an operating system behind multiple products. However, it felt more like a separate, outdated outsource tool. We crafted a new, flexible styling format that could incorporate the unique brand identities (imagery, fonts, and colors) of each brand. This made users feel like they weren’t leaving the site they were trying to access, and thus a more seamless journey.
To scale for new markets, we worked with Legal to add international marketing permissions and legal disclaimer needs
Outcome
Vogue was the first to test and roll out the new UX. After introducing the new experience in 2021, we saw encouraging results immediately with both the rate of successfully signed in (authenticated) users as well as an increase in registrations.
The authenticated rate increased +131% with the new UX. That meant nearly all users were verifying their new accounts.
In just one month—after launch in June 2021—Vogue.com’s signed-in users jumped from 5K to 30K, a 500% increase. Since then we have seen registrations and signed-in users continue to increase month over month. In four months’ time, Vogue saw 171.7k registrations.
Shortly after the test, we also launched the new registration gate to the international audience navigating to Vogue.com—being the first brand to do so, and British Vogue thereafeter.
As of 2024, we have 6.3M registered users across Condé Nast brands, including all international brands, following the same Legal permissioning templates and brand identity styling we crafted for the 2021 launch.
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