Medscape: Next Gen First Peak Free Gating Widget

Increased conversion rate of Anonymous traffic to logged in/registered users by 5% by revamping the First-Peak-Free widget experience

Former content gating widget (left)

Revamped version (right) - allows users to have an inline registration and login experience.

The How

Instead of redirecting the user to register/login page, I introduced an in-line experience on the article the user is on which improved the user experience and reduced the number of steps needed to register/login.

My Contributions

Discovery: Identified drop in the funnel in the older experience

Design: Conducted design and market research for similar features

Delivery: Defined user stories and product requirements and oversaw the entirely of the product life cycle

CONTEXT:

Medscape optimizes its monetization model through logged-in users, enabling targeted advertising. In addition, Our primary success metric is the number of U.S. physicians registering on our platform. This database of physician users is our most significant unique selling point over competitors.

PROBLEM:

While the traffic of anonymous users remained stable, we observed a decline in the number of users registering and logging in.

OPPORTUNITIES:

A detailed analysis revealed that this decline was mainly occurring at the First Peak Free (FPF) widget. Users landing on an article were prompted by a widget to sign up or log in to read the full article. However, clicking the call-to-action (CTA) redirected them to a separate login/register page. They lost sight of the article they were initially interested in, and clicking back still left the content gated, causing them to bounce.

ACTION:

We decided to revamp the entire FPF experience. In the new design, we introduced an inline registration/login feature within the widget itself, allowing users to create an account or log in without leaving the article. This improvement significantly enhanced the user experience.

RESULTS:

This change led to an increase in conversion rates, with 2% more anonymous users becoming registered users and a 3% increase in logged-in users, totaling an overall conversion rate improvement of 5%.