Premium Registration

 

Goal
To encourage The Weather Channel users to sign up for an account and purchase a Premium Subscription.

Role
Lead Product Designer

Softwares
Sketch | Invision | Photoshop

Duration
12 months

Overview

Like most subscription-based companies out there, The Weather Channel decided to introduce the option for a user to create a free account and subsequently purchase a Premium Subscription to avail of more features, like Premium Radar. We introduced this new capability on our website first, then apps, thus becoming fully cross-platform functional. I learned a lot being the lead designer on this monumental effort, and collaborated with numerous teams to get this over the finish line.

 

User Types

  • New Users

  • Returning Free Account Users

  • Premium Users

The Subscribe screens on the left were the landing page for users looking to purchase a subscription. It boasted of the different features they would get if they upgrade and had to be updated constantly along with input from our marketing team.

“20-40 million users visit the website on a daily basis. We are targeting 1% of US audience without partners (60M users > 600K) ”

— The Weather Channel Marketing Team

 
 

Stakeholders

  • Web Core: Ensure a seamless collaboration to make sure we don’t disrupt the existing experience too much on weather.com

  • UPS 2: They built the backbend user management system that we are using to allow users to create a direct relationship with our brand. Basically, the ability to sign up/log in/purchase.

  • Piano: Our third-party team helped us build the entire payment process to increase revenue. The screen shown on the right illustrates the payment modal which I designed keeping in mind Piano’s existing capabilities and tweaking the CSS. There was a lot of back-and-forth and weekly check-in meetings to ensure a smooth collaboration process.

  • Privacy & Legal: Our in-house team ensured we were fully compliant.

 
 
 

Payment Modals

Piano helped us build our entire payment process for the user to complete their purchase. They had a lot of restrictions, example: we had to use a modal and not a separate page for the checkout process.

 

Cross-Platform Compatibility

We made sure to address these UI changes amongst all our products, including our iOS App (iPhone + iPad), Android App (phone+tablet), and Website (Desktop).

We also had to account for all the sign up + log in screens, error states, etc (included below)

Sign Up Screens

Sign Up Screens

Log In Screens

 
 
 

Business Impact

As the #5 Most Trusted Brand in America, it felt so exciting to launch this product which ensured our company is the best in class for privacy, security, and accessibility, but also to provide a design-focused point of view that favors our users while not compromising our brand.

The Weather Channel subscriber base grew by 100,000 people in 2021. As of January 2022, we hit 1 million active subscribers, which is an indicator that our users are open to paying for expanded Premium content that allows them to make more informed decisions. This release was extremely timely!

 

Fast-Follow: Premium Radar

As a fast-follow post MVP, we launched one of our most coveted features: Premium Radar on our website.

We gave up to 48 hours of Premium Radar to our free users.

We gated 72-Hour (3 days) radar, which meant the user had to upgrade to a Premium Subscription to avail of this feature.

 
 
 
 

Takeaways

Real-time troubleshooting, constant collaboration, numerous screen share sessions with dev and QA, plus honest feedback from our leadership team made this project a huge success. I got my first promotion at the company after this launch and made a real impact on our annual revenue for 2021.

 
 
 
 

Swag

I also got to design a t-shirt for our team to commemorate this project launch! We sent these tees and similar stickers to all members of our organization, it’s super fun spotting these in the wild :)