Existing experience
The existing experience didn't require customers to log in until they were at the closing stage of the home buying process. Since it was not used very often, it was neglected and broken. Based on research and a critique of our existing experience, we uncovered the following problems:
- The experience said "welcome back" no matter whether you were a new or returning user, along with a lot of other UX and eng debt
- The app and web had separate logins, so customers had to maintain two separate accounts. In addition, the login experience was inconsistent across various parts of the product, which led to a lack of trust and customer confusion.
- Bonus: Not being logged in caused a lot of downstream security concerns for customers later in the flow
- Due to a lack of trust in the Opendoor experience, many customers entered a fake email. When customers were pleasantly surprised by their offer and decided to move forward, they were unable to actually access their offer and were forced to go through the flow again
- There was no indication that a customer was logged in, so people got confused as to which account they logged in with and how to log in.
Areas of exploration
After looking at the current experience, we had 2 main questions:
1. Where is the best place to surface account creation?
2. What should the account creation flow look like?
Where to prompt login
We briefly explored prompting customers right away with a sign in wall to even start the flow. However, we ultimately decided it was better to give customers some value before asking them to log in. Since the current prompt for email was doing well, and to reduce the amount of variables, we decided to keep the prompt in the current spot.
Account flow competitive analysis
Since logging in and account creation are well established patterns, we didn't spend a lot of time doing our own research. We looked at competitors and companies across the space and found two main login patterns:
1. Traditional email and password
2. Magic links
We weighed the pros and cons of each method. Since we were worried about people abandoning the flow, we decided it was too much of a risk to use magic links. We were concerned customers would check their email and then get distracted and forget to come back to the flow.
FIrst test designs and learnings
Evolution and later iterations
The logged in experience unlocked several previous obstacles. We were now able to store customer data on their dashboard (which would have been a privacy concern with a non-logged in experience) and we could marry a customer's buyer and seller information in one dashboard, which had never been done before.
We were shocked to learn that adding social buttons increased our primary metric (email collection) by 40%! We also learned that since the buttons were below the fold, some customers didn't scroll to see all the login types. We launched a quick iterative test to switch the order of the buttons, which led to even greater results in email collection.
With the rollout of the Opendoor design system, we solidified the account creation and login flow in the figma library, and made it consistent across all platforms.
