Kliq

Role: Lead Product Designer

Kliq’s mission is to let creators create an app or web space for their community and start earning straight away.

But the first thing a prospect saw was a “Book a demo” Calendly link on sign up.

• 60 % bounced as soon as the booking page loaded
• 40 % of those who booked never showed up
• Support burned five hours a day, giving the same walkthrough

Growth flat‑lined, momentum died, and creators assumed Kliq was a white‑glove agency not a self‑serve platform.

The Challenge We Set

How might we let a new creator move from website sign‑up to a live, monetisable space (App & Web) without human hand‑holding, so we can scale acquisition and free support for high‑value edge cases?

What Happened After the Redesign

• +29 % sign‑ups
• 3× more creators reached the build dashboard
• 11 % published within 14 days
• –67 % week‑one help‑desk tickets

Objective – Clear the blockers and make self‑serve possible

Kliq began life as Remote Coach, a tool just for personal trainers.

When we opened the platform to all creators, the biggest obstacle was our own admin console:

• Screens were cluttered and inconsistent.
• Core tasks like “Upload logo” or “Set pricing” sat three clicks deep.
• New users landed in the product and asked, “Now what?”

Until we fixed that experience, any self‑serve or onboarding flow would crash.

So we rebuilt the web‑app console from the ground up, kept the trainer‑loved features, and aligned everything with the new brand.

What the new flow must achieve

1. Sign up on the marketing site.
2. Navigate a clean, guided console.
3. Publish real content without ever booking a call.

Success targets

• Cut pre‑launch calls by 70 %.
• Cut week‑one help‑desk tickets by 60 %.
• Raise onboarding completion by 60 %.

Minimum requirements

• Setup guide appears on first visit and is always one click away.
• Progress meter stays visible.
• Users can skip and resume, never trapped.
• One‑click SSO to speed account creation.
• “Most popular” plan called out to simplify choice.

Console rebuilt and targets set, we moved on to studying the best self‑serve patterns in the market.

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Design process

Conversion was the north‑star metric, so we worked in tight two‑week loops, not a single pass through the double‑diamond.

Empathise

• Benchmarked Shopify, Wix, Linktree, Canva and five more products to study sign‑up and first‑time dashboards.
• After each launch we added creator interviews, Hotjar replays and support‑ticket themes for richer insight.

Define

Turned findings into a focused question, for example:

“How can a creator join Kliq and publish a first product without any human touch‑point?”

Ideate

Sketched multiple user‑flow options, held quick crits with PM and engineering, chose the leanest path.

Prototype

Built click‑throughs in Figma. Updated design‑system tokens after every release to keep UI consistent.

Test

Ran UAT with devs, then a 5‑user Maze session on Friday to catch usability snags.

Implement

Pushed behind a feature flag, watched Hotjar click maps and Looker funnels for two weeks, picked the next hypothesis.

Each release fed new data back into Empathise and Define. After three loops we achieved: +29 % sign‑ups, 3 × more users reaching the dashboard, 11 % publishing within 14 days.

Competitive Research & Key Patterns

To avoid reinventing the wheel I deep‑dived into ten products that already deliver friction‑free sign‑up and onboarding:

Shopify · Printify · Gelato · Linktree · Notion · SpreadConnect · Wix · Figma · RPC Fast Pricing · Canva.

After screenshots, teardown notes and a quick heuristic scorecard, five design moves surfaced again and again:

1. Welcome dashboards that show one clear “next step.”
2. Progress bars that frame the journey and keep momentum.
3. A prominent “most‑popular” plan card to simplify choice.
4. Inline tool‑tips so creators never have to open a help doc.
5. Single‑click SSO (Google / Apple) right at the very start.

These became our guard‑rails: every concept we sketched had to feature at least four of the five. By anchoring our own flow to proven patterns we reduced guess‑work and could focus testing time on the parts that were unique to Kliq.

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User Flow From Sign‑up to Publish

After mapping the best‑practice patterns, I sketched three candidate flows with our PM and engineers. We aligned on the one below because it used every proven pattern and could be built within a single sprint.

Top row · Self‑serve checkout

• Enter basic details and give GDPR consent with one‑click SSO.
• Choose a creator type (fitness, cooking, podcasts, etc.).
• Pick a pricing plan.
• Pay and land straight in Admin Home. No calls, no waiting.

Bottom row · Guided onboarding inside the product

• Customise look & feel — name, logo, colours.
• Get paid — connect Stripe in one step.
• Create a subscription tier — set price and trial length.
• Create the first programme — upload initial content bundle.
• When the checklist turns green, the Publish button unlocks and revenue can start.

Why it matters

This flow removes demo calls and other friction that were causing drop‑offs.

A motivated creator can now go from marketing site to a live, monetised app in under 40 minutes down from several days under the old “book a demo, wait for a walk‑through” model.

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First release in production

We moved from whiteboard to live code in just 14 days to prove that a zero-call journey could work in the wild.

Screen-by-screen breakdown

• Screen 1 | Single-page sign-up
  
  • Google or Apple one-tap SSO, plus e-mail fallback for edge cases.
• Screen 2 | Bare-minimum details
  
  • If e-mail is used, we ask only for name and password, no extra friction.
• Screen 3 | Creator-type pills
  
  • Quick tags (Fitness, Cooking, Podcasts…) let us preload styling ideas later.
• Screen 4 | Plan picker
  
  • Three tiers with Professional pre-labelled Most popular, a tactic we saw boost uptake at Shopify.
• Screens 5 & 6 | Payment
  
  • Promo code first, then Apple Pay, Google Pay or card.
• A green progress rail across the top shows users exactly where they are.
• Screen 7 | Intentional loading moment
  
  • Two-second “Setting up your space…” makes the leap into Admin feel deliberate, not jarring.
• Screen 8 | Welcome dashboard
  
  • Four-step quick-start checklist front-and-centre; tasks grey-out when done.
  • Tutorial videos and an FAQ sit underneath, so help is visible before users reach for support.

Why ship this version?

• Hit four of the five benchmark patterns (SSO, progress rail, most-popular plan, welcome dashboard).
• Needed no deep back-end changes, so the dev effort fit inside one sprint.
• Real user data beats theoretical debates. This build lets us start measuring drop-offs immediately.

Two-week results

• +12 % lift in sign-ups
• -67 % support tickets (vs. call-based flow)
• -86 % faster time-to-launch
• But only 6 % published within 14 days

Hotjar showed heavy drop-off right before payment. Our first hunch was “price,” but a benchmark check revealed nearly all competitors offer a free trial.

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Second Release — 14-Day Free Trial

Hypothesis

“Creators hesitate to pay for a brand-new platform; a trial will remove that risk and boost publish rate.”

What changed

• Added a 14-day free trial banner to Screen 1
• Deferred payment capture until the end of the trial

Outcomes

• +9 pp additional lift in sign-ups
• Early publish rate crept from 6 % → 7 % (still small)
• 68 % let the trial lapse without paying

What we learned

The trial solved price anxiety, but it revealed a deeper issue: creators still weren’t hitting the “aha!” moment inside Admin.

New questions that shaped the next loop

1. Are we attracting the right creators in the first place?
2. Which specific step inside Admin blocks them from shipping?
3. Is the core product itself the right fit for what creators need?

Third Release — New Questions, New Loop

The free-trial boosted traffic but exposed deeper problems, so we opened a fresh cycle with three questions:

1. Are we attracting the right creators?
2. Inside Admin, which step really blocks “Publish”?
3. If only 7 % ship, is our product-market fit as tight as we think?

Hypothesis

Even with a free trial, the plan + card screen still scares people away.

What we changed

• Stripped Plan + Payment out of self-serve – two steps gone.
• Added a skippable Pre-onboarding quiz (launch urgency, platform, first module).
• Redesigned Admin Home into a three-item checklist with a live preview:
  1. Create first module
  2. Upload logo + colours
  3. Connect Stripe
     The Publish button lights up at 100 %.

Self-serve is still a single page: email or SSO → 14-day trial → Admin in under 30 seconds.

How we validated

We ran 8 moderated Hotjar sessions, recording clicks and think-aloud commentary.

• Removing price friction felt “safer,” so everyone finished self-serve.
• 70 % filled in the quiz; 30 % skipped without losing momentum.
• All testers understood the new checklist and stopped hunting side menus.

Results after 2 weeks

• +8 pp further lift in sign-ups — total +29 % versus the original call flow.
• Publish rate up to 11 % (almost double the 6 % we saw before the checklist).
• Day-one support tickets fell -40 % on top of the earlier reductions.

We cut friction again and added insight: more creators in the funnel, clearer data on who they are, and a guided path that finally gets them to “Publish.”

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Take-aways & next steps

We turned Kliq’s “book-a-demo” choke-point into a 40-minute self-serve funnel.

Along the way we:

• lifted sign-ups +29 %
• doubled the publish rate to 11 %
• cut week-one support tickets by two-thirds

That progress came from three fast loops:

1. Zero-call MVP – proved creators could reach Admin without help.
2. 14-day free trial – removed price anxiety and exposed deeper friction.
3. Quiz + three-task checklist – trimmed more steps and surfaced the true “aha!” moment.

What I’d sharpen next time

Clicks tell me where users drop; conversations tell me why.

To replace the last pockets of guesswork, I’d bake qualitative insight into every sprint:

• Creator interviews
  • two quick, moderated calls each sprint, recruited straight from the free-trial list.
  • screen-share the journey and probe hesitations in real time.
• Unmoderated think-alouds in Maze
  • five key tasks with voice recording on.
  • transcripts capture the exact language users use (“I’m not sure what module means”), feeding copy and onboarding tips.
• Insight wall & decision log
  • each finding goes onto a FigJam board as Observation → Pain → Opportunity → Decision.
  • no feature ships unless it links to a quote, clip or metric on that board.

Why? Because a steady stream of first-hand stories kills “maybe-itis”, keeps the squad aligned on real problems, and makes the next metric-moving iteration arrive even faster.