Designing for Subscription Success

Hi, my name is Lauren Strehlow. I'm a design evangelist, and we're going to be talking about designing for subscription success. Subscriptions are the fastest growing business model on the App Store. But why is it almost every time you're ready to sign up for some awesome new service, or subscribe to some new, exciting content, this is the feeling that you get? That’s because it's all too common for subscriptions to feel complicated, confusing, and just take too long to sign up. So for a great user experience, make your subscription effortless, transparent, and engaging. In other words, make it easy to subscribe.

Let's focus on each of these principles to improve the user experience and design for subscription success. What does it mean for your subscription to be effortless? First, it means people should know that you have a subscription. They shouldn't have to look for how to sign up. So be visible, get out there, and don’t be shy! Let people know that you have a subscription and ask them to sign up. One approach would be to persist a subscribe button in you app’s interface. So here, in the New York Times app, they persist -- tastefully -- a subscribe button that is visible across all of their articles, and this is done really well. It's not annoying or pushy because it families together with their interface.