Designing a Seamless Free Trial Experience for Students
As the only Product Designer on Top Hat’s Billing Team, I worked with a team of developers and a product manager to identify experience gaps and bugs as part of a department wide QA initiative. The main goal of this initiative was to address any core issues in preparation for the Fall semester, so that we could reduce support cases and provide a better experience for our users during our busiest time of year.
User Research, Interaction, Visual Design, Prototyping & Testing, Responsive Web
Top Hat
2021
The Company
Top Hat is a digital education platform with tools for classroom engagement as well as interactive textbooks and assignments used by thousands of professors and more than two million students across North America.
The Problem
During the first few weeks of class, many students are frustrated that they have to pay before they can gain access to their courses on Top Hat.
Since free trials are currently account specific, students are also only able to access the free trial during the account creation process. If a student needs to use Top Hat again in the following semester for a different course, or accidentally misses the “Create 7 Day Trial Account” button during the initial account creation there is no way for them to access the trial again.
We also learned that 60% of ~73k student cases in FY 2021 were in regards to Payment, Registration and Refunds
And had a prediction that ~27% of all student cases could potentially be solved without a strict paywall.
Auditing the Current Experience & Looking at Support Cases
Before starting any work on this project I really wanted to understand the current experience and empathize with our end-users. I did a full audit of the current experience and went through all of the support cases for FY 2021 that were in relation to Payment, Registrations and Refunds.
From performing an audit of the current experience I learned that the 'Create 7 Day Trial Account' button was tied to the account creation process which created many problems for our users and led to a high volume of support cases and detractors in our NPS score. I has an assumption that this could partly be due to the visual styling of the button (as you can see in the image, the button is blending into the background colour) and it is also often hidden below the fold.
When I dove deeper into the FY 2021 support cases, I learned that having the free trial tied to the account creation process was especially problematic for students returning to the platform. Since students have to use university emails to access Top Hat, we were not providing the affordance to allow students to access a free trial again in future semesters.
Key Takeaways
• 7 days is typically not enough time for the free trial period, especially for:
- Students requiring financial aid who are still awaiting funds
- Students who are unsure if they are going to drop the course and don’t want to pay
• Free trials need to change from the current account-specific model to a course based free trial model.
- The account-specific model is not flexible and does not provide an easy way for students to gain access to a free trial if it is missed during account creation.
- We know that students must use university provided emails.
• Having free trials linked to the account does not provide an option for students returning to Top Hat in future semesters.
• Many students completely miss the “Create 7 Day Trial Account” button during account creation.
- As a result, users are requesting to delete their account so they can redeem the free trial they missed (as a workaround). This is creating addition unnecessary work for the Support team.
Assessing The Risk
We knew that there could be some resistance around increasing the length of the free trial period and questions around how this could impact the business when it came to collections.
Before any design work even began, we ran an experiment during the Winter ’21 semester (knowing that this work was approaching). This experiment would delay billing until 14 days after the start of the semester for 50 Top Hat courses.
Key Learnings from Winter ’21 Free Trial Experiment:
- Instructors had the opportunity to address any questions or concerns from students during the first weeks of class, without students being locked out!
- No student support cases from traditional problem areas (e.g. trial requests, pricing confusion, etc.)
- 100% actualization on all courses in the group by the end of the experiment window (14 days)
