The images below are part of a flow that sends users (who are already customers and used the Simple Free product the previous year, as well as those same users who have not filed their taxes yet) an email with an offer to “save time” and pull last year’s tax return information into the current year’s return. However, to do so, you have to upgrade to the Classic Product. But as an extra incentive, you also get several other features when you upgrade.

For this task, the requirements were to essentially refresh the content and UI. However, I was also tasked with answering the following questions:

• How can we improve this modal/process?
• With the increase of Free Users, is this an opportunity to convert more Free Users to our Classic Product? As of 2019, the Original Design was producing a 6.8% conversion rate. After the Update Design was implemented in 2022, the conversion rate has [increased/decreased] [% goes here]. (Data coming soon.)

At first glance, there were lots of elements I questioned/wanted to understand more about in the Original Design:

• Icon: Why does it look like someone is leaving?
• Bullets: What are the bullets? Are they features? What is IRS Inquiry Assistance?
• Social Security Box: What do you need my SSN to upgrade? That seems scary.

After digging into the flow a little bit, I discovered there was a “reskinned” (low effort, design facelift basically) version in the backlog. So, I decided to investigate a little more. After all, if one of the questions to answer is “Can we convert more users?” I need to know as much about the build of this modal and the flow/process as possible.

Even though the modal felt better from a UI standpoint, there were still a few things that bugged me:

• Icon: The icons looks better, but still doesn’t match the messaging. The subtext literally talks about “time savings.”
• Bullets: The bullets’ content still wasn’t updated and didn’t tell me enough about those features to push me into wanting to upgrade for them (in addition to importing my my prior year’s tax return).
• Social Security Box: Although the styling looks better, nothing about the content makes me feel any less nervous about typing in my SSN (even though I’m in a fintech application).

So, I started to ask a few more questions. The first question I asked was, “Does the SSN have to be on the same screen as the upsell language? Can it be moved to like a ‘second step’ situation?” And then, I asked, “If the user receives an email that has a unique identifier, once they click the email, they’re going to have to log into the app. Why do we need to ask them information that we already have on file? And if it’s for security reasons, the user has already logged into their account securely from an email with their unique identifier attached. Can this portion of the modal simply be removed?”

The answer was, “Yes! You’re right. It’s not needed. Let’s get rid of it.”

Woo hoo! My first win.

The next portion of the modal that I wanted to tackle were the bullets. If I (someone who works for this company and should understand how most everything works… to an extent) don’t know what a bullet means, the average user probably won’t either. And if they don’t understand on first read, they’re not going to try and understand it for the sake of spending money and upgrading.

So, after speaking with a member of our content team, we aligned with features that highlight “savings” rather than “time savings.” In addition, we added extra details to any feature that might be less clear as to what it is. For me, the features are much more compelling when you think about all that you get in addition to pulling your prior year tax return’s information over.

Yassss! Second win!

I was also able to change:

• Buttons: I updated the “Verify” button to “Yes, Upgrade,” which is super clear and less intimidating.
• Alignment/Positioning: I centered and stacked the buttons to prioritize the upgrade button over the “No, thanks” button. In the Original Design, this button was left aligned with all of the content and made it feel like that’s the primary action you should take.
• Icon: I also was able to swap out the icon with something that matches the theme of the modal header… which is savings.
• Success Screen: I noticed that there was no “success screen.” A.k.a. no confirmation that an upgrade has happened… other than the title of the page at the top left changes from “Simply Free” to “Classic Edition,” but… the average user probably wouldn’t notice that if I had to guess. So, I suggested we not only add a success modal once a user upgrades, but also add a bit of “delight” to the modal. …and that’s how the “Confetti Modal” was born lol. Once the user upgrades, a “success modal” appears and confetti (which I animated) falls from the screen.

Hopefully, these (what might seem small) changes will make the modal seem more compelling to the Simply Free users (who already have shown interest by clicking the email) and convert more of those users to Classic users.