Subscription Checkout Experience

The Dallas Morning News: Digital Subscription Checkout Experience

The Dallas Morning News used a multi-page digital subscription checkout flow for their users, which required users to click through 3 pages before their final purchase. Looking to increase subscriptions, the team looked at options for how to streamline this experience for users to increase conversions with a simplified process.

Diagram showing three screen process of digital subscription checkout flow.

Original multi-page checkout flow for DallasNews.com subscriptions. Click image to enlarge.

Working with Product Managers, Engineers, and other designers, we began researching best practices (both inside and outside the industry) for optimal checkout experiences. This also included ongoing discussions with Engineers to uncover potential road blocks and edge cases, such as the implementation of invisible recapcha. Additionally, I also worked with Stakeholders and Engineers to gather neccessary acceptance criteria for credit card information, storing information, etc. in order to make sure we were legally compliant, but also reducing form fields where appropriate to speed up the user's input.

A few new key features here to make the checkout experience easier for users:

Progress Bar: lets the user know how far along they are in the process, and how many steps are left
Product Features box (right rail on desktop): reminds the user of the benefits they will have by purchasing this product, and builds more confidence in the user's purchasing decision
Sales Tax detection: sales tax is "generated live" when the user provides their ZIP code in the field under Credit Card information.
User-Friendly input fields: Adding more distinction to field labels, and also adding placeholder text within the fields to provide users with exampes of proper formatting for information.

Result: 14% increase in digital subscriptions

Two page flow showing new digital subscription checkout experience on desktop

New single-page checkout flow desktop experience for DallasNews.com subscriptions. Click image to enlarge.

Two page flow showing new digital subscription checkout experience on mobile

New single-page checkout flow mobile experience for DallasNews.com subscriptions. Click image to enlarge.

After a few weeks of A/B testing, results showed a strong increase in conversions with the new Single Page Checkout experience - a 14% increase. The new checkout experience also demonstrated that the Company was significantly outperforming its goals of digital subscriptions. Overall, the new checkout experience was received positively both internally and externally.