Legacy Flow Redesign for EDU in Win32
Client: Microsoft
Timeline: Sept 2020 - April 2021
Role: UX Designer + Illustrator
Office for Education
Microsoft offers a variety of options for schools and higher education institutions to purchase Office for students and faculty. Education licenses account for over 15% of activated Win32 clients, or approximately 22M users each day.
We recently introduced an acquisition surface for expired education license users that is now driving over 50k sub adds/year and 360k Office.com offramps/year. Read this article to learn about how we identified this audience and ran an experiment to improve both our customer satisfaction and business metrics!
Post-Graduation Office Experience
In many cases, student and faculty users are activating education licenses on personal consumer devices. When a student graduates or a faculty member leaves, the school deactivates the EDU account. This leaves the user with an unlicensed installation of Office on their personal device.
To understand the user experience, let’s say a user creates a resume in their final weeks of college. They type it up in Word and print a few copies to take to the career fair.
A couple of months later, after the user has graduated, they launch Word to update their resume with new job information. The education license from the college recently expired, so the user is in an unlicensed state.
In the current experience, they see one of the two following messages:
To continue using Office on their device, the user needs to (1) switch to a consumer MSA from the deactivated commercial org ID and (2) purchase Office. The current experience is essentially a dead end for users who don’t already have an MSA with an Office entitlement.
Each month, there are over 1.5M users who launch an Office app in an expired EDU state. On average, these users leave over 2k negative OCV feedback items each month.
New Acquisition Surface for Expired EDU Users
To address the negative OCV feedback and keep unlicensed users within the Office ecosystem, we recently introduced a new acquisition surface for the expired EDU audience. The new experience gives users the option to start a free M365 trial, sign in to another account, and use free on Office.com.
Now, when the user launches Word to edit their resume after graduation, they see one of the two following messages:
We hypothesized that by adding acquisition flows to the expired EDU experience, we could increase both the trial conversion rate and free offramp rate, as well as reduce negative OCV feedback.
Understanding Business Impact
The new experience rolled out as an experiment to measure how much the new dialogs affected our customer satisfaction and business metrics. In the control group, users saw the old experience with no path to continue using Office. In the treatment group, users saw the new experience with options to start a trial or use free on Office.com.
The experiment ran for ~3 weeks and showed that the treatment was a winner!
The acquisition scorecard showed highly stat sig +56.3% lift in trial rate, +11.39% lift in activation rate, and +7.59% lift in LTV. We estimate that the new experience will drive 50k sub adds/year.
The freemium scorecard showed +7.61% lift in Office.com usage. We estimate that the new experience will send 360k users to Office.com/year.
We are still in the process of finalizing annual impact and determining impact on OCV feedback.
What’s Next?
The new acquisition surface for expired EDU users serves as a proof of concept that (1) graduated students want to continue using Office and (2) providing clear language and simple acquisition flows improves conversion rates. We plan to expand and iterate on the current experience to maximize impact.
One potential iteration involves the existing 12 months for $12 alumni discount offer. We hypothesize that surfacing the alumni discount offer would significantly improve our conversion rates, so we are investigating opportunities for determining offer eligibility in the client. We are currently limited to only showing free offers since the user could be a minor.
Other opportunities include pre-expiration messaging, expansion to all expired commercial users, incorporating Dime inline purchase, adding direct contact admin options, and more!