Making a membership legible

iQiyi brings Asian entertainment to a worldwide audience. In North America that means 6 surfaces — iOS, Android, tablet, responsive web, Roku and Amazon Fire TV — and one standing constraint: hold the company's identity together while each surface still fits its local users.

Checkout data put the exit rate on the Membership Selection page at 43.2% — more than 4 in 10 people reached the page where they choose a plan, and left. Two different groups were stuck there. Prospective subscribers could not connect what a package described to what they would actually get to watch. Existing subscribers were not sure which membership they were already on.

Engineering capacity was tight, which set the terms for everything that followed: whatever I designed had to be reusable to be worth building at all.

I ran a survey through the newsletter, an in-app and on-site flash notice, and push notifications — 2 weeks of fieldwork, 1 week of analysis, 11,765 responses, 89% from the US and 11% from Canada.

The survey had ruled out the flow, so the work moved from fixing a funnel to making the service legible. 8 moderated interviews and usability tests — 4 in the US, 4 in Canada, across diverse racial and ethnic backgrounds — told me where the confusion actually sat.

Four how-might-we questions came out of that: help users easily compare membership packages, understand what a privilege means in real practice, feel the value of the membership, and manage their own membership status. Each one became a design track.

Every signifier decision after that followed three rules: simple but comprehensive (never substitute one tag for another — show every VIP marker), helpful (VIP versus free, airing info and titles all present), and standardised across platforms and across drama and variety alike.

Against a 43.2% exit rate going in, sign-up rate rose 43% once the flow was rebuilt around what people had told us they were actually buying. The share of higher-value Premium memberships rose 23.6% over 2 months.

The constraint turned out to be the outcome too: because the tag and signifier system had to be reusable to get built, it ended up working across drama and variety, and across every platform — which is what made it the starting point for iQiyi North America's first design system.

The membership display and VIP signifiers shipped in June 2022. Membership Switch stayed a concept.

The VIP signifiers hold together across the product for the same reason. The phone, the web player and the tablet are not three designs that happen to look similar — they are the same rules rendered three times. Standardised was one of the three rules for a reason: it is what let a 2-person build reach 6 platform surfaces.

Alongside the membership work, and separate from it, I built and extended iQiyi North America's design system library. The membership components and the VIP signifiers fed into it — that is how they got there — but the library was its own piece of work, with its own output.

I was the only designer on the region, which meant every pattern I shipped either became a rule, or became a one-off that the next person would have to guess at. I chose rules.

The clearest worked example is the global navigation — what “design system” meant in a team of one: one component, specified across 4 breakpoints, 6 page contexts, 5 feature panels, and both signed-out and signed-in, before a single screen was handed over.

There is always another opportunity in the product, if you stay patient enough with users to hear it.