Portfolio > Upgrade moments for a freemium plan

Project TL;DR

Why it mattered

🎯 Mural’s new freemium plan was central to company OKRs and customer expansion strategies

⚖️ Upgrade prompts in product required a thoughtful balance of customer and business needs

🤑 $90,000 in new revenue generated after 5 weeks of launch

Challenge

Mural, a digital whiteboard and collaboration company, was overhauling its pricing plans and acquisition strategies. And in a month, a new freemium plan would launch with feature limits and triggers meant to convert free users into paying customers. As lead content designer, I was asked to provide messaging.

• Messaging needed to encourage upgrades by people who valued Mural while not pushing away users who, for whatever reason, weren’t yet ready to buy.

• How would that messaging embody Mural’s developing voice, and express itself consistently through the journey of marketing and product experiences?

• High-profile nature of the project meant hands-on involvement from executive stakeholders with lots of ideas and opinions.

Process

• Joining the project in flight, I soaked up existing briefs and artifacts, and met with the leading designer to review the flows so far.

• I realized it would be critical to establish shared understanding and goals among the diverse set of cross-functional stakeholders, at all levels. So I advocated for a working session that would include directors along with working team members.

• Using a series of structured activities, I facilitated discussion about the content’s goals and our voice and tone profile. Synthesizing as we went, I helped the group further define what success would look like:

• After voting and group writing exercises, we emerged with a clear set of priorities and raw material for exploration.

• From there, I started to play with ideas and share them for early feedback with the core working team:

• This led to 3 refined directions for the most important of the upgrade moments. Again I elicited feedback, most of it asynchronously.

• I frequently pointed us back to our shared goals and voice profile, evaluating decisions and options through those lenses. I asked questions of Product Management to refine how we communicated value propositions, and of Marketing to check how our messaging would complement their work and larger Mural brand narratives:

My contributions

Project facilitation, Voice and tone, UX writing, Content strategy, Microcopy, Content system guidelines

Outcomes

• Buy-in and seamless approvals from executive stakeholders. Working session had established trust and got everybody on the same page.

• Visuals, interactions, and content that all complemented each other in a set of upgrade moments designed holistically.

• $90,000 in new revenue generated after 5 weeks of launch.

• Guidelines established and further developed, both for brand voice and our modal UI component.

Reflections

• Looking at the content now, I see where it could’ve been sharper. And it was designed for a specific arrangement with a different visual, but that changed and I think the result doesn’t hold together as well. Lessons in context, iteration, and ownership.

• Wish we’d been able to follow up with performance monitoring and testing of different variants.

• “Level up” now feels overdone and hollow, but at the time it fit with brand themes.

• It’s such a simple yet powerful thing to elicit feedback with structure — ”I like…” “I’m uncertain about…” “I wonder…”

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