Starbucks - please make it easy for me to sign up!

My day generally starts with a Starbucks, and includes office, home, family and Netflix, and more Starbucks. Probably Starbucks is my 3rd most favorite place after home and office. Starbucks is the only common thing for any given day irrespective of if I am on vacation, busy work, long drives or just lazing at home! You get it by now, I am a huge loyal Starbucks customer. Over the last 2 years I have tried to sign-up and sign-in to Starbucks app few times and each time going through a horrible experience. I work in Consumer Identity (Sign Up/Sign In) for a living so thought of giving this article a shot to try reach this to someone in Starbucks tech team to help them fix Starbucks Sign Up experience. No, I am not looking for a job! I love my current gig at Lyft. This article is a result of my sheer love for Starbucks and being a good citizen of Starbucks!

Disclaimer: This article doesn't include any of the trade secrets or intellectual property from any of my previous or current employers. Starbucks is free to use this as they see fit without any restrictions or Terms & Conditions. 6 design principles detailed in this article are universal for designing Sign up experience so not specific to Starbucks.

Here is the existing "Sign Up" experience from the perspective of user experience journey:

I drink Starbucks at-least few every day, wondering if there is a loyalty program or points I can collect I downloads the Starbucks app from store. Easy to find and easy to download. I will give plus points for that. Launching the app is OK too. The first landing experience is colorful, bit too colorful. I see too many distracting buttons, prominent is "Join now" so that helps a bit for sure. There are too many secondary actions, and I am assuming the Starbucks wants more users use MOP (Mobile-Order-Pay) hence the default is "Join now". It is always a tough tradeoff to optimize for user acquisition by focusing on "Sign up" while having a big leaky bucket or to optimize for user engagement/retention by focusing on "Sign in", or the new paradigm where to not offload cognitive load on user to decide if to "Sign up" or "Sign in" but let the user freely assert what their identity is and let the app decide if this user has to sign up or sign in. It has few caveats in effectiveness when you want to intensionally optimize for user acquisition vs user retention. Nevertheless having one primary action like "Join now" works, and there should be no more than one secondary action, else user will end up with a confusing first experience if not at least quite distracting one thus low Sign up completion rates overall. First impression matters lot more than it is stressed. These days everybody judges the book by its cover, so!!

I click "Join now" knowing I had an account here that I had loaded $10 long time ago, and finding that account is too much of a maze. I am still loyal customer of Starbucks so continue to click "Join now" to start my relationship with Starbucks afresh. The next popup I get is more confusing than before. Asking users too much is always a bad idea, if you want to give those many options then at a minimum make it easy. Explain it no more than 3 words. It is not impossible. Push hard and you will find ways. Popups must be used when you want to notify users to take them on a detour from a flow they are in, not when you want them to continue in the flow they were already in. Convert this popup into a regular next screen action, reduce text, add pictures if it helps, and if you can skip this step entirely that's even better. This is too much of fuzzy actions, without clear indication to user what he/she is signing up for. Signing up to create an identity/account should be different from how user wants to pay, both are significantly different thought process and confuses the users. Creating an account itself is often very confusing and cognitively heavy, do not make it worse by asking users to decide how they want to pay right at this step. You can do a better job about pay later!

3 page long sign up form!!! Even banks do not have this long sign up forms. Collecting all information about a user is good, but that leads to terrible sign up completion rate. What you ask user through sign up process has to be very meticulously thought through. If the information you ask during sign up flow is not going to be used in the first 3 minutes after user completes the sign up then do not ask it here but do that later, as part of in the flow contextual experiences telling user why you need this information and what value does user get by giving you that information. First name and Last name is used to welcome the user on the welcome screen post sign up hence it is going to be used within 3 minutes post sign up so you are OK to ask for name.

Email and password.., Woah! Lot of red flags here. Can you do phone number and a one time verification code sent to phone number instead? If you absolutely need email as a username then can you do one time verification code sent to email instead? That acts as email verification that proves the ownership of the user identifier, and meets user authentication. You must have terrible verified email currently in your system now, right? Passwords are evil, the weakling in the world of security, and you should do what it takes to kill them, not nurture them! Such complicated password rule. Life is already hard, can I just drink good coffee? Think hard, do you need email because you want to send email to the user or do you need email because you want it to be the username? If it is former then go for phone number based sign up. Phone numbers are fast, easy and users can relate to that more easily than email address. You can always ask for email address later to continue to spam the users with all sorts or marketing and promotional emails.

"Join Starbucks Rewards" This is too late to explain the value proposition to user. Your designs has to be value first designs. Tell the user what value they are going to get by "signing up" before they click the button "Join now" on the initial app landing page. If you think this is adding value now then you have already failed to begin with. You do not need birthday now, ask later. You do not need "sign in faster" now, ask later. While reading "sign in faster" I kept wondering can you do "sign up faster" for me please!

Rest of the consent for terms of use and receiving promotional emails are just fine and you are doing a good job on that. I would keep them by default unchecked, it conveys user trust and not put you in rest of the scam apps bucket that trick users in getting spam that every one hates and no one cares! Make it default opt-out, and if you do a good job sending the relevant emails then you will have an awesome brand like Starbucks already has and people will opt-in anyway. You are optimizing for means but not the ends. Means is no good if you are not thinking about the ends. Not whats but whys that drive the optimization funnels better.

"You're in!" Finally! No wait, there is more before I can get my coffee. Perhaps this is your most impactful screen. Can you make it more motivational? What's in it for the user here? Why should user pay $10 or $25 ahead of getting value for that money? Products that provide value first and ask for money later makes sense the most. Why should a user pay you first? This page is very heavily loaded from what goes on in the user mind. You need to address all those questions that I just listed and sell this step to the user. In all of the Starbucks sign up flow I would consider this is the most critical step and there is almost no information or attempt to sell it to me why I should pay you $10/$25 now? I am not saying this is a bad idea or this won't work. Starbucks is a strong brand and users will trust Starbucks to do the right thing so won't mind paying you that money in advance. What can you do on your end to make it more sellable? Can you charge users when they order their coffee realtime, thus ask for only payment method but not charge now? I completely understand payment processing-wise and fraud-wise it adds lot more complexity but how hard can you push yourself here to make this screen more sellable to the users? What else can you do if not charge per use, such as "Pay $25 now and get a coffee on us for free?" or ask here if they want to load their existing store card if not then purchase one to mimic the physical store experience? Just asking users to pay money won't cut the deal! It gets worse as you are one of the only few who do this. It doesn't convey trust!

The welcome screen and settings are nicely done. No complaints here. Conveys what I need to know and get started. I can get my coffee! yeah!!! Although I would have liked it if you can say "Hey Suhas" or something to personalize the welcome screen experience especially when you asked me to fill in so much about me through the sign up flows. Apart from that, everything else here looks good. Up-sell of Touch Id during sign in is fantastic. Can reduce bit of technical terms to convey simplicity to users, but nevertheless the up-sell itself is good. Having all the user consents and preferences in one place for user to review and change when needed it a beautiful Identity practice. Kudos to this! Thank you.

OK, I guess enough of complaining! My intent was to explain the rationality than just saying this is good vs this is bad. Teaching to fish is better than giving a fish, right? Apologies if it comes out as overly critical! Now on to the good parts. Below is my design proposals! I have been an Identity Product Manager for long so trust me to know that below works, OR better yet experiment with these to learn why something did not work for you in specific and be able to tweak to make it better! I would love to get your feedback post to your experimentation to learn what worked and what did not work.

Simplified Landing Page with clear Call To Action

App landing page to have just one call to action, and convey enough value proposition on why user should sign up. Below is the design proposal for the app landing page, this is just an example, but anything that can be built around these 3 design principles will do:

• Principle #1: Value first design. Tell the user what value they get by creating an account.
• Principle #2: Lead the user. Do not give too many options/clicks/decisions to start with. Make it simple. First decision they make must be very obvious and very easy.
• Principle #3: Choose a default call to action based on your strategy on every page

If your strategy is to optimize for acquisition in which case you can use "Join now" or if your strategy is to optimize for user retention rate because you have already acquired lot of users already then use "Sign in" or something neutral like "Get started" and later in the process decide for the user if to get them through Sign up or Sign in flows. On any given page you should have one primary action that stands out significantly that takes user to next part of the flow, and you can have at most one secondary action, anything more means you have work to minimize the UX by creating separate user flows .

3 minutes Sign Up rule

Sign up flow is always seen as a friction, but is a necessary one so as to identify the user and be able to provide a better experience for those users post sign up. So the goal of the sign up flow is not to just ask bunch of questions to the users but to ask the ones that matters enough to give a good user experience within first 3 minutes after sign up. If something is not needed for offering that first 3 minutes experience then do not ask it. You can always ask for it later while providing more context, in the flow, while explaining to the user what will they get if they share that information with the app. This will have tremendous impact on Sign up completion rate. Below is the design proposal for Sign up flow, just an example, but anything that can be built around these next 3 design principles will do:

• Principle #4: Minimum PII (Personally Identifiable Information). Do not ask for more PII than needed to get through sign up flow. Follow 3 minutes rule. Users are not comfortable giving out PII without knowing full context. Each time we ask for PII leads to increased cognitive load as the user needs to make a decision weather to give it or not.
• Principle #5: Secure by default. Passwords are evil - avoid them at all cost. If needed ask for it later. There are too many online identities any given user has, do not ask them to create yet another.
• Principle #6: Use machine input more than human input. Collect as much of machine input you can, especially those which can replace human input such as IP to auto fill zip code, country code etc

Rest of the information that Starbucks currently asks

Date of Birth (DOB): You can experiment with asking DOB after user gets 5 coffees. "Hey, when is your birthday, we want to make sure we wish you with a free drink!"

Load Starbucks Card: Give option between existing card user might have vs getting a new one. Use icons/pictures to convey the difference between the two. If you want to use text then no more than 3 words. Strive hard to move to pay upon order as quickly as possible. Asking for money upfront before delivering value is a tough sell.

Touch Id: You do not need Touch Id. Once a user signs in you should do what it takes to keep the user signed in. Touch Id is useful when you want to protect a high value asset behind it that attackers can abuse or do a account takeover. Requiring users for Touch ID is just over engineering. It's good security but an overkill. It's a necessary bandaid to avoid using the password you should not ask users to set it in the first place.

Reward Stars vs Points: 125 stars after you achieve Gold status by acquiring 300 points is bit confusing. You could experiment with buy 10 coffee and get 11th one on us or better yet give an option to donate it to others! Starbucks takes pride in being a good socially responsible company, extend that for your loyal customers to take part in. Identity is my expertise but not "Rewards" so feel free to ignore this suggestion as it is not based on data or experience but just my opinion.

What about Sign In experience: Well this article is already so long, so Sign In for next time!

Wrap up - To Starbucks team!

Customers of Starbucks either want to hang out in the store, or want to get in and get out fast, and most often same customer will have these 2 different behavior depending on the time of the day. I completely agree with Starbucks strategy of Mobile-Order-Pay push to move the second type of customers to use Starbucks App as much as possible so as to differentially serve both set of customers better. It makes total sense. Please give this a shot using the six design principles mentioned above for Sign up flows. I would love to hear from you what worked and what did not work, and your learning from experimenting with this. Starbucks - please make it easy for me to sign up!

Disclaimer: This article doesn't include any of the trade secrets or intellectual property from any of my previous or current employers. Starbucks is free to use this as they see fit without any restrictions or Terms & Conditions.