Issuu: Increasing conversions to paid plans

Objective

To improve the conversion rate of Issuu’s pricing page and to improve the overall understandability of Issuu’s features and plans.

Results

Substantial increases in the conversion rate on all available paid plans and overall upgrade funnel. Changes in user behavior also suggest a better comprehension of features and functionality.

Background

I began work on Issuu’s pricing page and upgrade funnel as a senior UX designer when I first joined the company. After taking on a UX design lead role, I then had the opportunity to make larger and more impactful changes to the pricing and upgrade experience with the ability to employ both managerial authority and and hands-on design work to improving conversion.

Headquartered in Palo Alto, Issuu has offices in Copenhagen, Berlin, and Braga (Portugal). Its leadership team is distributed between Europe and the United States, and most of its employees, particularly on the product side, are located in Europe. In my own work, I needed to coordinate with stakeholders in all four of Issuu’s locations to ensure that design solutions were properly conceived, tested, approved, and implemented.

Problem

1. Issuu’s existing pricing and upgrade pages did not adequately explain features, their functionality, and their value to new and existing users. This was contributing to churn, misunderstandings of how features and paid plans worked, and missed revenue opportunities.

2. Many paths to upgrading a user’s Issuu account lacked necessary context around the features and functionality that users were interested in.

Concept 

Issuu is a platform that helps creators and businesses transform static, scrollable documents like PDFs — from brochures, to whitepapers, to magazines — into web-friendly digital flipbooks, articles, and social media posts for easy online sharing. Founded in Denmark in the mid-2000s, it’s a respected brand amongst independent publishers, real estate brokerages, educational institutions, and creative professionals, among others.

Issuu’s primary source of revenue comes from monetizing creators through upsell for greater storage space and additional features on paid plans. While the platform continues to expand its capabilities, a legacy codebase and a history of engineering-led norms can pose a number of challenges, as well as opportunities when undertaking initiatives to improve the features, functionality, and overall value of the platform.

Through a ground-up redesign, we were able to dramatically increase conversions on Issuu’s pricing page, as well as its upgrade page. We were successful in doing this by redesigning the graphic user interface and more clearly differentiating advantages of yearly vs monthly payment plans. Equally important was rewriting how each feature was described, highlighting additional forms of functionality, and presenting complementary features in more contextually relevant groupings.

Here is Issuu’s pricing page in 2021 (left) on my first day of work compared to the redesign in 2023 (right) that I oversaw the as the UX lead.

Here is Issuu’s upgrade page for logged-in users in 2021 (left) compared to the redesign in 2023 (right) that I oversaw the as the UX lead.

Understanding and Observing 

As demonstrated above, some problems with the pages when I first joined Issuu were fairly obvious from a UI perspective. Certain color contrasts were not compliant with modern-day accessibility guidelines. There were also visual and editorial differences that created friction in user comprehension of features and plans. There was no need for the upgrade page to be as radically different from the pricing page as it was. The pages were, however, getting decent conversions. Any UX improvements would only be implemented with a solid foundation of carefully-gathered evidence and clear communication of opportunities to improve conversion.

Upon first joining Issuu as a senior designer, I was placed on what was at that time called the “conversion and growth” team. There, I Worked cross functionally with a product manager, a development team, two junior designers, and stakeholders in our customer success and marketing departments who owned final decisons on any changes to the pages. It is worth noting that at this time, UX maturity at Issuu was low, from an organizational perspective. I was one of several new hires who had been brought in to raise the bar for design at the company. Issuu had a product people wanted. Now it was time to start developing a value proposition and a design language that better reflected the value of what Issuu could do for its users.

Before that work could begin, however, I needed to build my own familiarity with Issuu’s features, it’s user base, and the organization as a whole. To that end, I began by aggregating all of my findings on Miro, where I could map out a mix of user feedback, problematic areas of the interface, quantitative data, and key product functionality. The results of all of my findings were mapped onto what I call a “tactical” data wall, as it is an aggregation of information meant to help identify what tactics should be employed to begin tackling the problem.

I also needed to better understand why the users who chose to upgrade to a paid plan or signed up for a paid plan from the start were choosing to do so. To that end, I conducted multiple long-form user interviews with customers who had recently upgraded, and also participated in two workshops speaking to long-time paying customers about what they most and least appreciated about Issuu as a SaaS solution. More data walls were made. From there, our qualitative was synthesized and mapped into several distinct thematic buckets.

During this process, feedback was filtered yet another time into several actionable user insights. After affinity-mapping each insight, the design team was able to construct several clear and concise user needs. In the end, the collected needs were very diverse, as the questions formulated by the design team to users were more journey-centric at this point, rather than specifically page-focused. They were meant to document difficulties with the product as a whole. This of course included, but was not limited to, our pricing and upgrade pages. Results were shared with product managers, as well as members of the marketing and leadership teams. A key pattern that emerged was that customers were often as concerned about the user experience of the people reading the content that they were producing as they were about their own user experience as people creating and sharing that content.

Problem Statements

A problem statement was created for each specified user need. The user needs related to pricing and upgrading were most intimately connected to customers often struggling to clearly connect a specific Issuu feature or plan to the the goals that they had for the content that they were publishing. When a customer was interested in a given feature, the context in which the feature existed needed to be more clear — both in terms of how it helped the customer’s audience, and how it helped the customer with the goals that they had when engaging with that audience in the first place. Here is an example of one of the problem statement that highlighted this core idea:

Initial Experiments

Such findings, of course, were not discovered in a vacuum. Other teams, from engineering, to product management, to marketing, to customer support, to leadership, also had a vague idea of these user problems along similar lines. This was largely due to their own contact with customers, feature-usage data, and revenue targets, which the design team also reviewed. My earliest cross-functional work in addressing these problems did not in fact start with our pricing and upgrade pages, but instead by improving our upgrade modals. If users clicked on paid features while on a free plan, they would activate a modal that allowed them to quickly enter their payment information and upgrade to the plan which enabled that feature. In short, clicking on a paid feature while on a free plan simply activated a payment widget.

Upgrade modal design (left) upon first joining Issuu in 2021 and proposed changes to visual design and user flow (right).

If our UX findings were correct, I needed to demonstrate that clearer, more contextually driven feature descriptions would also create a higher conversion rate. The first place that this was done was in our upgrade flow, where we took the controversial decision to actually add a step to the process, and show additional context around a feature before throwing payment details at a user. Many feared that adding this step would lower the conversion rate instead of raise it, because of the potential for some users to drop out on that additional step. The thinking was that the user has already indicated some interest in a paid feature by clicking on it. Shouldn’t that be enough? Why take the risk of adding a step?

Our team took the risk anyway, and designed a host of different modals. They displayed different information, as well as a unique illustration and value proposition for each paid feature the user was clicking. UI components were also redesigned to be more readable, as well as accessible with keyboard controls. We then ran 50/50 AB tests on our new modals, with the generic modal as our control.

Context-driven upgrade modal designs

Our tests showed a higher conversion rate for the modals that had more contextual information about our features and plans, despite creating an extra step for the user. As a result, they quickly replaced our generic upgrade modal and additional variations were designed in order to maximize conversion rates in other parts of the product. Different layouts and formats were also tested in different contexts and with different CTAs in order to optimize conversion further.

Newer variants of upgrade modals

Applying learnings to our pricing page

Pricing pages are tricky things. Their success or failure indirectly affect the fortunes of many different kinds of stakeholders at a company. Therefore, it’s not uncommon that many levels of input and buy-in are required before making significant changes to anything related to pricing. It is a rare opportunity to do a complete overhaul of a pricing page. This is especially true at a profitable software company where legacy can sometimes make it tempting to not fix what doesn’t feel broken.

As a result, our pricing page went through a period of very small and gradual adjustments, none of which were design-led. Many small-scale A/B tests were conducted (perhaps too many). Very little about the actual feature descriptions, groupings, or even appearance of the page significantly changed. Subtle differences in conversion were carefully monitored. Some UI components were updated, and conversion sometimes improved, but only slightly. Some adjustments failed, and quickly had to be rolled back. The layout of the pricing and upgrade pages still differed more than was necessary, and information was not grouped as contextually as it could be. Customers also reported misunderstanding certain features and pricing plans. Our enterprise plan, Issuu Teams, also made our pricing and upgrade pages look more busy than older versions of the page.

Issuu Pricing page (left) and Upgrade page (right) at the beginning of 2023

By the summer of 2023, however, circumstances changed. More than a year prior, I had been promoted to the role of UX design lead. During that year, I hired and built out a new team of eight designers. I was also responsible for successfully plugging them into existing cross-functional teams with the goal of modernizing our interface and launching more successful features. As new hires started getting results, a series of additional design successes gradually built enough stakeholder trust to begin a complete redesign of our pricing page.

To begin, our design team aligned key objectives with the monetization goals of product managers, and went about rethinking our pricing page from the ground up. The perspectives of tech leads, customer success agents, and our marketing team were also incorporated into design needs. Our one constraint was that our first iteration could not alter what features existed on which plans. For everything else, however, from visual design, to UX copy, to the order and context in which we displayed certain features, we had free reign to try something new.

Competitive analysis, internal research, and workshopping

Both designers and product managers conducted their own independent desk research and then compared notes. While this was happening, engineering teams were updating critical services and cleaning up legacy code to prepare the page for more drastic changes. After a boxed period of research, the initial competitive analysis from both PMs and UX uncovered that similar products to Issuu listed a greater number of features and functionality on their pricing pages than Issuu did. This was not due to competitors necessarily having more features. Instead, they had often stated each capability that their tool had in more specific terms. This made certain capabilities more clear, and also made their offering look larger.

Through our own internal discussions with customer success and BI, we also reviewed the top misunderstandings of our existing pricing and feature descriptions, as well as what specific terminology was unclear to users as it regarded specific features. This qualitative data was also layered atop churn and feature usage numbers to more specifically pinpoint key areas for improvement. After our period of research concluded, I conducted a workshop with a smaller group of key stakeholders on the project.

The goal of the workshop was to map out all of our features, compare them to how they were depicted on our pricing page, and then agree on a new set of feature groupings to test. We identified which value propositions were functional (such as purchasing a specific paid plan to access more of a specific capability like storage space) and which were binary (such as purchasing a paid plan in order to fully gain something like an ad-free reading experience). We then placed each categorized feature under what key sources of value to the customer they applied to, such as creating content, publishing it, sharing it, or analyzing the performance of content. After that, we grouped the features under the plans they were currently offered on.

Over the course of the workshop, more ideal groupings were created and reviewed (the details of which I cannot show publicly). Additional visualizations of how our most valuable features were distributed across different plans were also created. Different pricing strategies were discussed for different circumstances. For the shorter term, we used visualizations such as these to thematically group our existing feature set in ways that could be more clearly connected to actions and results that were of clear relevance to users.

Designing and testing prototypes

Following the workshop, we took time to vet the categories created and refine them further. Still, the concept of identifying the best possible thematic groupings for different features stuck. It helped shape our design work, and enabled planned UI enhancements to be all the more impactful, thanks to more contextually-relevant groupings of features. The most valuable categories and groupings were placed closer to the top of our pricing page design. Just like in our upgrade modals, we were designing with more visually appealing components, and operating off of the assumption that the user needed more context in order to take action.

Through multiple rounds of usability testing, we refined our UI and revised our categories. This ensured that all information on the page was both understandable and valuable to users in how they were grouped and presented. Other UX best practices were also added, such as keeping buttons for each plan sticky on top of the page as the user scrolled and compared options. UX copy was also edited, vetted, and revised with input from Issuu users, people who didn’t use Issuu, and our marketing team.

Example of when user is scrolling down the pricing page to compare plans

At the top of the page, our most valuable features for each paid plan were highlighted, and the price distinctions between yearly vs monthly billing were made more prominent. Our goal in doing this was to encourage users to pay for a yearly vs a monthly subscription by highlighting the savings that they would get if they did so. Additionally, we needed to showcase the unique advantages of Issuu’s enterprise plan, Issuu Teams, for larger organizations. Tooltips were also added to give additional context around features and billing.

Top of redesigned pricing page

Testing and Launch

Once the design was ready, a 50/50 AB test was conducted between our existing pricing page and the new pricing page. The test measured conversion numbers on each plan. We also collected data on the how many users were signing up for yearly vs monthly paid plans on each version of the page. UI improvments aside, we had changed the way we were describing and grouping our core features, and we had also listed a great many more capabilities that previously were not listed on the page.

Again, there was concern from some stakeholders that the added complexity to the page could harm conversion more than the added context would help it. We were operating off of the assumption that it was in fact better to show more information rather than less.

Control page (left) and redesigned page (right)

Measuring success

After more than two weeks of testing, the redesign outperformed the existing pricing page by a wide margin on every type paid plan. Conversion was significantly higher in all cases. Our second goal was also reached, with far higher numbers of users signing up for annual plans than monthly plans. Although I cannot publish exact percentages or total numbers, I can say that the impact on overall revenue is high, and is the most significant improvement in conversion that the pricing page has had in years. The impact is more comparable to the launch of a successful feature than the optimization of a page. This was also all achieved with no changes in the price of the product, or even the features offered on different plans. Based on the results, all design changes were also applied to upgrade page — finally unifying the value proposition and design language on both pages.

Reflections

The learnings from design changes made to our upgrade flow and our pricing page have demonstrated that users value greater context when making decisions, especially financial decisions. We will also see in the coming months and years to what degree our redesign might improve user retention and reduce churn, compared to previous years. Careful review of heat maps already seems to be showing patterns around which types of features customers are most interested in understanding better. It is too early to say, but initial increases in usage of certain Issuu features appear to be correlating with the release of our updated pricing page. It could be that more specific descriptions and categorization of key features is also contributing to a greater overall understanding of those features, and more engagement with them as a result.

Overall, our initial research-informed hypothesis also appears to be correct. Users were in fact facing difficulty connecting their publishing goals to specific features in our product. Our latest redesign seems to have dramatically improved their capacity to connect their goals with our features. By improving how we visually communicated features and plans, as well as clearly specifying how certain features supported user goals, we have successfully given more people the confidence to sign up for Issuu’s paid plans and engage with its most valuable features.