Replicate the desktop sign up experience on mobile

[Yndira-E]

Description

As per @JoycePlaysFootball’s feedback, we’d like to replicate the sign up desktop experience in the short term. In the long term, we can rethink it.

Current mobile page:

Epic/Story

No response

Have you provided an initial effort estimate for this issue?

I have provided an initial effort estimate

[Yndira-E]

Tagging @dimitrieh @allthedoll for visibility

[dimitrieh]

@Yndira-E @JoycePlaysFootball to place this well on the roadmap, could you sketch the intent in a few lines?

• Who is this for? (e.g. prospects evaluating on their phone, existing users on the go)
• What can they not do today? The need in one sentence: "X needs to Y but can't because Z"
• What have we seen or heard? Any signal that prompted this (feedback, session recordings, a specific person struggling)
  • Consider moving this issue to the product repo if you want to share internal context freely as this is a public repo.
  • from the description seems joyce has feedback on this already
• What changes if we ship it? What would they do differently, and how would we notice?

Rough answers are fine!

[Yndira-E]

Hi @dimitrieh

Who is this for?

Prospective users evaluating FlowFuse on their phone who decide to start a free trial from a mobile device.

What can they not do today?

Mobile users can still sign up, but the mobile experience differs significantly from desktop. It removes the supporting branding (it doesn't even display the logo) and messaging, leaving only the form, which may reduce confidence before signing up.

What have we seen or heard?

While reviewing PostHog, Joyce noticed that mobile visitors to /account/create have an almost non-existent conversion rate.

We haven’t yet confirmed that the mobile layout is the cause, but the significant difference between the desktop and mobile experiences makes it a reasonable hypothesis worth testing.

What changes if we ship it?

In the short term, we’d like the mobile experience to more closely match the desktop experience rather than presenting a completely different layout. If the current mobile experience is contributing to abandonment, we’d expect to see an improvement in mobile trial registrations after release. Longer term, we can revisit the mobile experience more holistically based on the data we gather.

[dimitrieh]

@Yndira-E thanks. This is great info. The problem I think with mobile conversion to let it become a success is that we are not optimised for a mobile experience being a success now after signing up. The UI is cramped and creating value comes after doing things in Node-RED, which in and of itself is not yet ideal on mobile.

Have we considered perhaps being opinionated here by: Stating towards the user that we are a desktop only experience when on mobile. One can come back when on the desktop. We could offer an email field to send themselves an email to sign up and try out the platform on their desktop machine, and then navigating them towards website product pages that outline the value of FlowFuse depending on their interest? I think this is where the use case pages can also become a strong point rather than just talking about platform capabilities.

PS: related context on usecase vs platform capabilities pages: https://flowfuse.slack.com/archives/C0B9KUA3YES/p1784720236621219?thread_ts=1783681026.210959&cid=C0B9KUA3YES

[knolleary]

The form itself is identical in the two cases. What gets hidden on small screens is the left-hand column of text, including logo.

The quick fix would be to stack the left hand column of text above the form. But the user then has to scroll at least a whole screen's worth of content to get to the form; that doesn't feel ideal as there's no action visible for them when they view the page and may be counter productive to the experiment of getting more mobile-based signups.

Is there are more concrete proposal on what the mobile page should look like?

From an implementation POV, the entire left-hand column is a customisable piece of content that the platform Admin configures in the platform settings. If we want different content (in terms of layout etc) on mobile, we'll need to find some way for the admin to provide that content via settings.

[dimitrieh]

The problem I think with mobile conversion to let it become a success is that we are not optimised for a mobile experience being a success now after signing up.

@knolleary what are your thoughts on effort vs value on us optimising for mobile here?

[knolleary]

I agree that the experience once signed in on mobile is not good; our product just isn't designed for mobile use.

In terms of effort/values - if there is a quick win to be had on the mobile sign-up page, then making it so would at least give us some data on whether it impacts mobile sign-ups or not. That then feeds into future decision making on whether the post-login experience for mobile needs improving.

This is why I'm asking if there is a specific design in mind to help assess required effort.

[allthedoll]

I caught up with @Yndira-E on this after the product/marketing meeting and I think we do want to see if there is a quick win here. In the spirit of that, I made a smol ticket for @n-lark, our resident quick iteration mobile-friendly dev. @Yndira-E this is unplanned, lower priority work compared to what we have, but she's pretty fast, so we'll see what we can get done this week and next, otherwise I'll get it planned for the first sprint of next month.

https://github.com/FlowFuse/engineering/issues/191

[allthedoll]

This is closed by https://github.com/FlowFuse/engineering/issues/191 and #7928 but we do have one small follow up based on a comment @Yndira-E left. @n-lark let's open a ticket to address that item and pop it onto your icebox for when you have time.

[n-lark]

Documented here: https://github.com/FlowFuse/engineering/issues/201 @allthedoll