Challenge
Before this project, mobile web had never been top priority for Paperless Post. Even though the site was responsive, it was far from having feature or ux parity. The most important difference between desktop and web was that you could only customize or send cards from our native iOS app (and the web–iOS hand-off wasn't great).
But mobile web is hardly a trend to be ignored. Paperless Post, like everyone, was seeing increased traffic to our mobile website, mainly in the form of what we call “receivers” or party guests. Paperless Post is in the lucky position in that it benefits from a viral loop marketing strategy. Using the product naturally entails sharing it with your friends and acquaintances. The golden ticket was always figuring out ways of improving receiver–sender conversion.
Creating a memorable first impression
The biggest challenge with receiver–sender conversion is that a user going to a party typically doesn't have an immediate need (but she may down the road). We wanted users who were curious about our brand to have a place to go to learn about it andd get inspired for their own events.
The goal of this first phase, then, was to create a great first brand impression by providing both product education and a delightful browse experience. For iOS app users, we also improved our deep linking so users who wanted to edit a card design would be taken directly to the customization tool within the app.
Product education: More than just a pretty card
People know Paperless Post for its great design, but often its features are unknown to new users. Rather than just a card, you get a powerful event management tool. With this version of our onboarding content, we tried to briefly touch on some of those features to bridge the knowledge gap.
Mobile web to desktop conversion
As already stated, Paperless Post is mainly used for milestone events like a 40th anniversary, which are usually important enough that our users (who skew older) prefer the comfort of desktop. However, many people start their journey on mobile, perhaps researching digital invitations or browsing our designs. To help with mobile to desktop conversion, we wanted to give mobile users options for continuing their journey later: customize in app (iOS only), share with a friend (or your own pinterest board), or save by favoriting.
Conclusion
After months of work, we launched a brand new mobile website with solid performance gains. We saw a y-o-y sign-up increase of 10% for July. We have so much confidence in the new experience and stack that we've decided to port desktop over to the new codebase. [Update] We also have since launched a mobile web card sending (case study forthcoming!).