Inner Circle's gated registration process maintained community quality but created a growth bottleneck. only 62.5% of users completed registration. With Q1 targets set for new approved members, I needed to remove friction in the flow while maintaining our trust and safety standards. Funnel analysis revealed the biggest drop-offs at photo upload and face verification.

The challenge:
Balance competing priorities: improve registration completion to hit growth targets while preserving the quality standards that defined our brand. My initial hypothesis; that users didn't know what photos to upload or found verification unclear needed validation before committing to a full redesign.

The outcome:
After three A/B tests showed only minimal improvement, I made the strategic decision to invest two weeks in qualitative research rather than continue incremental testing. This revealed where the real problems were, and allowed us to make impactful changes that

• Reduced cognitive load on users during key stages in the funnel

• Increased registration completion by 8% (62.5% → 70.5%), contributing to 15% month-over-month growth in approved members

• Established business value of qualitative research across the company, shaping future onboarding strategy

• Two weeks of research prevented months of incremental A/B tests addressing symptoms rather than root causes