Modern application hosting

Kinsta’s hosting solution allows to quickly launch an application online.

Creating a simpler and more user-friendly process to launch an application online as a first-time user. From sign-up to post-deployment.

Full case study coming soon.

Usability research

To understand the current state of the product flow, I mapped out the current deployment process for each of our products from the perspective of a new user signing up.

Competitor research

I found that while our sign-up flow was short and required a credit card, the creation flow had many steps. That is the opposite of our competitors’ approach.

This means there are plenty of opportunities for improvement.

Fix what we have

I found more than 90 issues after a usability audit of the application creation flow in our production environment.

The new concept solved usability issues from before, reduced the number of steps to create an application as well and simplified which features first-time users might need for a successful but non-restrictive deployment. But we already saw that this would not be enough and more exploration will be needed to optimise the flow for new users.

Production version

Concept

Explore concepts

Using our design system components and different layouts I was able to show that we don’t need to have a crucial part of our application be accessed via modal windows.

  • Concept 1

  • Concept 2

  • Concept 2-1

  • Concept 3 - 1

  • Concept 3 - 2

  • Concept 4 - 1

  • Concept 4 - 2

  • Concept 5

  • Concept 6

Stakeholder approval

Before deciding which direction to explore in more detail, I facilitated design workshops to gather feedback and get buy-in from the project’s main stakeholders.

Minimalism as a feature of perceived speed

According to our research and data gathered from our analytics tool, the goal of new users is to deploy an application as quickly as possible. This meant that many of the features were only used after a successful deployment.

In short..

  • Based on our analytics data, we were informed that most first-time users do not change the available settings and want to deploy an application as quickly as possible.

  • Based on this insight, we decided to move most of the functionality outside the main creation flow and set smart defaults that could decrease the perceived deployment time to under a minute.

  • The underlying backend systems were optimized at the same time which led to an even more shortened perceived time of deployment.