Designers do a lot of work engineering the experience of creating compelling sign-up forms for a variety of reasons (joining communities, requesting more information, age-gating verification, etc.). I’d like to take a closer look at how the Thank You page of the conversion flow can be leveraged more effectively for experiences that aren’t necessarily tied to joining a social network.

That said, social networking sites are full of awesome examples where the Thank You jumpstarts the user’s uptake, if you’re:

• Tumblr, you have your user create her first blog post
• Twitter, you have your user find cool people to follow
• LinkedIn, you connect with your email address book
• Meetup, you have your user join a group

But, let’s say you’re a more traditional (perception = less fun) business like a university, can you do more than guide your user towards more descriptive content about the program or services offered (where bounce rate will be high)? How can you make the most of that transaction? How can you parlay the validation “Thank You” into action that can be both inspiring and measurable?

Thank You messaging is not supposed to feel like the awkward end of a first date “Do I kiss him?” moment.

The user has shared her information with you, triggering a response and follow up campaign. She’s staring at the Thank You page, confirming she submitted her information correctly. This is a powerful moment to turn your Thank You into more than:

• a data verification step
• a reiteration of your brand’s identity and tagline
• a jumping off into content (where the bound rate will be high and not super effective in terms of engagement, relationship development, etc.)

Social marketing channels have helped turn Thank You pages into opportunities for secondary levels of conversion where you can experiment with Facebook Fan Page and/or Twitter acquisition.

This brings me back to the use case at hand, while our lead gen page had a number of design constraints, we found that we had a lot of artistic leeway in creating a Thank You page, so we decided to make the number one goal of the page to excite the user to join our Facebook Fan page.

First, let’s look at the original Thank You page, which did include Facebook & Twitter opportunities:

(Note: I apologize for striking through the brand name, my client is a major university and getting approval to share the brand is a bit of a juggernaut.)

Now, let’s look at the redesign of the Thank You page, which puts primary focus on Facebook Fan acquisition v. promoting both Twitter and Facebook equally:

The design:

• Inspired by the idea of the excitement around an “acceptance letter”
• Focused on the fun of university life and community
• Featured access to current students, faculty, and admissions through Facebook

The results:

• Increased Fan Page uptake from 28 fans per week (a consistent rate for one year) to 300+ fans per week (2+ weeks of ongoing data)
• Increased the quality of interactions on the Fan Page, where we were encouraged to see prospects asking questions that were fielded by students, admissions, and faculty
• Increased interaction with blog content, driving traffic to the parent site and making better use of all editorial collateral

As You Design Conversion Experiences Thank You Messaging is:

• Integral—A necessary part of the conversion experience, it’s no longer just a simple hello/goodbye world
• Instantly Gratifying—If you’re testing a conversion experience the results are ongoing and take time. Adding a secondary conversion exercise like Facebook Fan acquisition is an immediate way to leverage (in real time) effects of your messaging
• Social—Leverages warm fuzzies in innovative ways and gets users connecting with one another
• Sticky—The last thing the user will remember about your brand, and can have the added possibility of taking the conversation even deeper into her personal network

Perhaps, the biggest takeaway from designing a great Thank You experience is that the more you can leverage the Thank You, they more you can get your users to connect with your app and with each other the less money you’ll need to spend on post conversion campaigns, marketing, and more.

Thank you!

*Design by my brilliant partners at jjomedia.com

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Huffington Post News Alerts Design

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Huffington Post Daily Brief Newsletter

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Fall 2009, I worked on and launched a new section for Momsrising.org for “Early Care & Education”

The site development included 3 unique content types:

• Wage Calculator (Aggregated results to share with policy-makers)
• Submit/Search Stories on Early Care & Education (DB)
• Resources

Technology: Drupal

Design: Ryan Meyers of 2twentysix.com

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Fall 2009, I worked with a fantastic team at Resource Media to build Nitrogen News. The site is a resource for journalists and bloggers covering nitrogen science and management policy.

Funding for this project is provided by the David and Lucile Packard Foundation.

Technology: WordPress

Design: JJOMEDIA, Jessica Teal

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Fall 2009, we worked with America Speaks to create an interactive community-driven web application for citizens to submit and self organize ideas to make Prince George’s County a better place to live, work, and play in the future.

During the fall of 2009 and the winter and spring of 2010 Envision Prince George’s conducted an unprecedented citizen engagement effort to engage thousands of people in helping to create a countywide vision along with a framework for cooperative action.

Envision Prince Georges County by America Speaks

Technology:

• WordPress
• SimplePress Forums
• Uservoice

Design by JJOMEDIA.com, Jessica Teal

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We decided to create a editorial feature that would express our irreverence to pollster data and elicit some smiles from some of our savviest users.

HuffPollstrollogy: 2008 Editorial Feature on HuffingtonPost.com

The goal was to create a simple chart, easily scannable and scalable (for both the candidates and a few enhancements that we suspected might be made along the way).

We had a few major challenges to work with:

1. Pairing weather forecasts with each of the candidates’ daily and hourly locations
2. Making a lot of data fit into a very tight (and unforgiving) horizontal space
3. Employing familiar iconography that would be sassy and smart and represent four very different concepts: Astrology, Weather, Polls, and Betting Lines.

As Arianna prefaced:

Polls have come to dominate the media’s horse race coverage of political campaigns. Pundits and reporters constantly use them to tell us who’s hot and who’s not — but skip over the fact that plummeting response rates and variables like undecided voters and margins of error often render these polls useless as anything other than lightweight diversions on par with horoscopes and political betting lines. Below you’ll find a slew of polling, astrological, and betting information that will hopefully help the polling junkies in the media keep polls in the proper perspective.

We’ve also updated HuffPollstrology to bring you regular takes from astrologers on the state of the presidential race. And we’ve included a section that digs deeper into how polls are conducted. And to make sure we’re really investigating, we’re going to add various blogs and articles that cast a skeptical eye on polling.

HuffPollstrollogy @ Huffingtonpost.com - Conceived for 2008 Presidential Elections

See it yourself: www.huffingtonpost.com/tag/huffpollstrology

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Plum TV's Five Things Newsletter: Aspen, The Hamptons, Miami Beach, Martha's Vineyard, Nantucket, Sun Valley, Telluride

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