Thumbtack
Increasing conversion by building trust with Pros
Role
Product Designer
Skills
Usability Research
Cross-team Collaboration
Responsive Web Design
iOS Native App
A/B Testing
Company & Role
Thumbtack is a platform that connects customers with independent contractors, referred to as "Pros." As a Product Designer, I collaborated directly with product managers, researchers, content strategists, marketers, data analysts, developers, and designers, specifically focused on growth. My team’s goal was to improve the user experience across responsive web and native iOS mobile app, and increase revenue.
The Problem
When I joined Thumbtack, the company had recently shifted their revenue model. New Pros were automatically enrolled in the auto-pay feature when they signed up for Thumbtack. In a baseline usability study, only 1 in 5 Pros could confidently explain how and when they would be charged. New Pros didn’t understand they were signing up for auto-pay, leading to a significant increase in chargebacks.
Solution
We designed an updated onboarding experience that improved comprehension and transparency about payments for new Pros, which led to a 20% increase in conversion on the payment completion step.
How we got there
The Pro onboarding experience required deep discovery and constant collaboration, with complex requirements from teams across the organization. I worked closely with a product manager and content strategist to craft a narrative that would provide clarity for new pros, which other teams adopted to improve comprehension across the entire application.
Qualitative Goals
We established three qualitative goals that we believed would improve the onboarding experience for Pros, specifically around the introduction of the new auto-pay feature:
Increase comprehension: Ensure radical clarity and full transparency regarding payments.
Motivate when the time is right: Encourage Pros to sign up for auto-pay when they are ready.
Build trust: Help Pros find the right payment structure for their business needs—it’s not a one-size-fits-all solution.
Ideation
I explored a range of opportunities focused on increasing comprehension and building trust with Pros during onboarding. To streamline our decision-making, I framed our thinking around two key questions:
When do we suggest signing up for auto-pay?
Weighing Options
Although Option 3 was our team’s recommended approach, it would have take twice as much time to build and test.
Ultimately, we decided the narrative in Option 2 best balanced the need to ship something quickly with enhanced education around auto-pay. Plus, in this sequence of steps, the Pro would have already made an investment in creating a free profile, which would encourage them to complete payment and setup.
How hard do we push new Pros to sign up for auto-pay?
We built trust with Pros by allowing them the option to skip payment during onboarding. Because of this new allowance, we had to consider how different types of new user would experience the Thumbtack platform for the first time. We designed engaging empty states using illustrations to serve two primary purposes:
Help Pros understand what’s next, contextual to where they are in their setup journey.
Provide hooks back into onboarding to complete setup.
Results
We launched the new onboarding experience as an A/B test against the existing experience, and the results exceeded our expectations:
Although it wasn’t our primary success metric, conversion increased by at least 10% across all key onboarding steps.
For Pros reaching the budget step (required for auto-pay), 20% more Pros completed this step. We believe the boost in conversion on the budgeting page resulted from improved comprehension of how payments work on Thumbtack.
We shipped the new experience and planned to monitor chargebacks and auto-pay adoption over the long-tail for the cohort.
Key Learnings
Collect user feedback early and often. Without a rapid qualitative usability study, we would not have understood the root issues of the existing onboarding experience (comprehension). After the launch of the new onboarding experience, we decided to do another round of qualitative research on the budget and payments page, to continue understanding user hesitation on this step.
Aim for smaller experiments. It was difficult to identify which change provided the most impact, and why. Was it the content that made users more likely to continue? Or was it the new sequencing of steps? If I were to tackle this problem again, I would encourage our team to break up our design changes into separate experiments.