User Engagement Lab is David Spiegel’s product growth practice. I work on conversion, onboarding, retention and pricing, and I start from how people see a screen and decide what to do next.
See the workTwo projects in detail, then the rest of the record.
Chargerless makes a fitness tracker that runs on light. I redesigned the product page around how the tracker works, built a configurator for finish, band and size, and kept the order button within reach on every scroll. I also ran paid acquisition and set up the tracking.
4×monthly unit sales in the first full month of the engagement
Which is clearer, 1 or 2?
I ran product while the company went from 10,000 to more than 50,000 patients. One A/B test changed how plans were presented at checkout. The new version made three changes, and more people bought and they chose longer plans.
+30%purchase conversion, with +76% average order value
Choose a plan
Sharethrough
Ad rendering for an exchange handling 160 billion bids a day: latency, load time, render rate and video start rate.
+$1.8M
Content IQ
Layout, ad placement, refresh and bidding experiments across more than 20 publisher sites.
+50% / +30%
The Sandbox
Redesign of the marketplace, homepage and onboarding, from heatmaps, session recordings and interviews.
−40%
Fluent
A/B tests on sign-up flows for sites taking more than 900,000 registrations a day.
+$1.4M
Memelord
Usage, conversion, subscription and churn analysis across web and iOS, with a ranked plan for onboarding, upgrades and retention.
Plan
Most projects start with one of these four. Every one includes the design and front-end work to ship the fix.
People visit and don’t buy.
Conversion optimization
Landing pages, pricing and plan pages, checkout. I find the step where interested people stop, redesign it, and test the new version against the old one.
People sign up and stall.
Onboarding and activation
The first session, setup, and the first thing a new user gets done. I cut what stands between signing up and getting something useful out of the product.
People use it once and don’t come back.
Engagement and retention
Repeat use, lifecycle messages, renewal and cancellation. I look at what brings people back and where returning users get lost.
People pick the cheapest plan.
Monetization and pricing
Plans, packaging, price framing and upgrade prompts. The same prices sell differently depending on what sits next to them, so I test how the options are presented.
First I look at the screen the way a stranger would. Often the next step is right there, and it looks like everything around it.
A target that differs from its surroundings in one basic feature, such as colour, is found in about the same time among five items or thirty. One that has to be told apart by reading takes longer with every item added.
A demonstration with two panels of fifteen buttons each. In the first, the Continue button looks like the others and has to be found by reading. In the second, it is the only red button. Press “Time yourself” to find Continue in each panel and compare your times.
It looks like the other fourteensimulated eye: 0 looks
It is the only red thingsimulated eye: 0 looks
Same fifteen buttons, same job. Find Continue.
A project usually starts with a review of one journey, for example signup to first purchase. I go through it with your analytics, your session recordings and the product itself, and write up where people stop and why.
Then I design the fix, and either build it or give your team a spec to build from. If you have the traffic, we run the new version against the old one. If you don’t, we compare before and after and I tell you how sure we can be.
I studied psychology at NYU on the cognition track, including a lab course in cognition and perception. After that I worked in product. I did monetization at Content IQ and ad rendering at Sharethrough, and I was the first product hire at 5 Axis Health, where I ran pricing, checkout, intake and retention.
At the Lab I do one thing, which is work out why people leave a product and change it so they stay. I design the changes and I can build them, so a project doesn’t end with a slide deck.
Or email david@heyspiegel.com