Registration by phone number
How we did registration by phone number and now 82% of new users successfully use it.
av.by is a online board for car sales. 4 platforms are web mobile, web desktop, android and ios apps. We have quite a big post base of 55 000 posts. Our company is 60 people with 1 500 000 users per month. This is the largest platform for the sale of cars in Belarus.
Problem and audience
We happened to have implemented registration only via email. We understood that this was not the most convenient way, but it worked well for many years.
We are a big project for Belarus and have a very different audience. Most of them do not live in big cities and have no idea what an email is and how to use it. Some of them are not able to submit an ad without the assistance of relatives and friends.
Nearly once a month, regularly, some users come to our office to ask for help to submit an ad. And the problem is not in the submission form, but in registration via mail. Plus, this problem has been confirmed more than once in the support service.
The problem is clear, the audience is large, it’s time to start doing something.
Solution
There is nothing to invent here, I want to register right away via the phone. Everyone has a phone, it’s a great solution. Registration via social networks is not suitable, not everyone has social networks. But, there are a few nuances.
- We cannot cancel registration via email due to technical limitations. We will support two ways.
- We cannot use the sign in via SMS message, it is expensive for us. Therefore, we considered logging in through a combination of a phone number plus a password. We use SMS messages only during registration.
This is what the flow of the current solution and potentially a new one look like.
Plus, after analyzing the current solution, we noticed that users are facing difficulty entering a password. For security, we ask users to enter a password longer than 6 characters. But users found out about this after the submission, which increased the registration time. This is what registration looks like step by step.
If at least 30% of new users use the new registration method, we will consider it a success.
Results
82% of new users use registration via a phone number. Users do not come to our office, and the support service does not receive requests for help.
Platforms
Basically, all solutions work on four platforms: web, android and ios. We also made the desktop version, but I don’t show it because only 17% of the audience use it.
My role
I participated in the development of prototypes, made layouts and information architecture, interacted with engineering team and product manager. I communicated with the support service to find out about user requests, and together with the support and the product manager, we determined the metrics. With my involvement I helped to improve the user experience and the number of requests decreased.
