Steven Hart
IVC Evidensia: Pet Health Club registration journey
Pet Health Club's home page and registration journey had two connected symptoms: only 21.5% of home page visitors ever began a registration, and of those who did, 36% didn't finish.
The problem
Framed as tasks, the brief was straightforward: generate more registrations from the home page, and reduce drop-outs from the registration process.
Framed as a single question, it was harder: was this a series of small usability problems to fix one at a time, or one structural problem showing up in several places?
Method
My approach was designed to move from diagnosis to validated recommendation in five stages: an expert review to locate friction and pitfalls; alternative designs to explore fixes; contextual interviews with real participants comparing the live site against the alternatives; Single Ease Question (SEQ) scoring to quantify the difference; and a final set of design recommendations, handed off for A/B testing.
The expert review covered both the home page and the registration journey.
The contextual interviews then tested both live and redesigned versions with participants thinking aloud, which is where the underlying pattern became visible rather than just a list of symptoms.
The insight
Individually, the register journey's problems looked like ordinary UX friction: a small, easy-to-miss plan summary; no obvious way to add a second pet; a date-of-birth field that forced exact information many owners didn't have. Fixable, but not explanatory.
What tied them together was the journey's borrowed vocabulary. It was built as a shopping basket — "continue shopping," card logos shown early, a page called a basket — because that's the interaction pattern an e-commerce platform defaults to. But applying for a pet health plan isn't shopping. It's providing information about your pets, yourself, and your vet practice, in order to be accepted onto a plan. Users kept noticing the mismatch out loud:
"that's not a basket page, that's a sign-in page"
"I'm about to enter card details to make the first payment" — before any pet or owner details had been given
"you don't know who I am; you don't know who my dogs are, but you're asking for money"
Each comment is a small signal of the same thing: the interface was telling users they were in one kind of task (checkout) when they were actually in another (application). That mismatch, more than any single screen, was what produced hesitation, backtracking, and drop-out.
The redesign
The work below is information architecture and interaction design: sequence, hierarchy, mental-model fit. Visual design was a separate discipline, out of scope here.
On the home page, the fix was sequencing content to match how a first-time visitor actually forms understanding — what it is, how it works, what it costs — before asking for a decision.
The practice finder and explanatory video, previously buried below the fold, were brought up the page, and a single "Join Now" call to action replaced the site's muddled mix of discovery and commitment links.
On the registration journey, the fix was to drop the basket metaphor entirely. In its place: a single "Join Pet Health Club" flow with an explicit stepped sequence — Pets, People, Practice, Review, Pay — that only switches the user into "register mode" once, at a clearly marked point, rather than blurring discovery and commitment together as the live site did.
The sequence deliberately opens with pet details rather than personal details or plan selection. Talking about your pet first is the emotional hook, and it also reflects what participants said unprompted: "actually it makes more sense to tell you about my pets first."
Two smaller decisions did a disproportionate amount of work. A "best guess" checkbox next to date-of-birth removed the anxiety of not knowing an adopted pet's exact birthday — a recurring, specific source of friction in the live journey ("I was muttering to myself that I don't know when they're born"). And practice selection was reframed as a discrete, addressable step, with copy explaining the difference between choosing a Pet Health Club practice and registering at a new vet — resolving a source of confusion that had nothing to do with the plan itself.
Validation
Before recommending anything for build, both versions were tested with the same participants using Single Ease Question scoring, rated 1–10.
The qualitative shift matched the numbers. Participants moving from the live journey to the redesign, without prompting, described it as "significantly better," "quicker and easier to use," and — from someone testing the multi-pet flow — "a lot friendlier if you have more than one pet." One comment captured the structural point precisely: the redesign "didn't have the fiddly basket step."
Outcome
The research produced a specific, evidenced set of design recommendations for both the home page and the registration journey, handed off for A/B testing so the improvements could be validated quantitatively at scale rather than resting on SEQ scores and interview evidence alone.
When pushed live, there was an uplift of around 25% in completed registrations.
Steven Hart