Spark migration campaign
PRODUCT DESIGN
GROWTH DESIGN
MIGRATION
ABOUT THE PROJECT
Spark 3 shipped in 2022, and the large population still using Spark 2 was never really told why they should follow. Some of them tried the new version on their own, hit missing features and rearranged settings, and went back. That left a harder problem than an ordinary migration: not persuading users to move to something new, but persuading users who had already formed an opinion to reconsider it. The task was to move a very large base of users from a free legacy product to a freemium one, and to do it in a way that converted rather than churned.
RESEARCH & DIRECTION
With a help of our talented researcher Olena Hrytsenko, I went through the existing survey feedback and reduced it to three problems worth designing against: - Unclear value. Users couldn't say what the new Spark did better, only what it did differently. - Disruption and time loss. Settings and workflows had to be rebuilt by hand, and nobody wants to spend an afternoon rebuilding something that already worked. - Learning effort. The interface had changed enough that familiarity counted for nothing. Each of those is a reason to postpone the installation of the new product. Postponing indefinitely is what churn looks like from the inside.
DESIGN PROCESS
Based on the pain definitions devised from the survey, our team came up with several strategic solutions across all communication channels: - Say what's better, repeatedly and in the right places. The value of Spark 3 was made explicit across in-app modals, email, and articles, rather than assumed. - Remove the manual work. An automated migration that would moved settings and workflows across to the new product, and minimized the pain of switching. - Support every step of the way. Arriving in Spark 3 with your own UI already in place turns a re-learning problem into a gradual discovery one and additional confirmation and support is critical.
TESTING THE FLOW
Before designing screens, I mapped the whole migration as a single user flow — every entry point, every state a user could arrive in, every place they could stall. Seeing it end to end is what surfaces the potential problems early, while they’re still cheap to remove. I built the scenarios in Lovable and walked stakeholders through them as working prototypes rather than static flows. In this way our team discussed and settled how potential problems could eliminated. Through several iterations, I have removed unnecessary steps from the flow and improved the future experience of the Migration Assistant.
OUTCOME
The first communication wave has beaten its 30-day migration target by a wide margin. Success of such transition was based on several important solutions created by the team: - a timely communication and promise through all channels - an effortless migration and sync process - an ability for the users to preserve their beloved UI settings and features in the new Spark What the numbers confirmed: the blocker was never persuasion. Once the manual work of moving settings and workflows was removed, people moved. This project was possible through the effort of very talented people involved: Kate Donahue (Marketing Director), Anastasiia Gryshchuk (PM), Natalia Kuzmina (PM), Olena Hrytsenko (Researcher), Yulia Shumna (Marketing Designer) and of course Spark Development Team. All of them contributed to catering to users needs, ensuring that no important features are missed, conducting research on blockers and creating a compelling marketing message.