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Driving growth with a 22% increase in new registrations through progressive disclosure
As the Design Lead at The RealReal, I collaborated closely with product management, marketing, and engineering to address a critical growth challenge: declining new user registrations. Since our platform requires users to register before browsing products, optimizing the registration flow was a top priority to fuel customer acquisition and business growth.
Our existing registration experience showed users a full form upfront, including an image, a $25 promotional offer for new users, and fields for both email and password entry. Despite the incentive, new registrations were steadily decreasing, signaling friction in the experience that discouraged users from completing the sign-up.
The RealReal runs on a consignment-based model, meaning forced registration is a key part of both buying and selling. That’s why we couldn’t just remove it—we had to find another way to improve the experience for users.
I thought using progressive disclosure — showing the form fields one step at a time — could help reduce the effort users felt and make the process feel less overwhelming. By showing just the email field first and then revealing the password field after the email was entered, I aimed to make the form feel quicker and easier, helping more users finish their registration.
Working with product, marketing, and engineering, I led the design exploration to reimagine the registration flow.
We implemented an A/B test with the following setup:
Control (A): The experience displayed the full registration form upfront, including both email and password fields, along with a $25 promotional image.
Variant (B): The variant initially displayed only the email input field, progressively revealing the password field after the user entered their email, while maintaining the $25 promotional image and messaging.
We defined new user registrations as the primary success metric and ran the experiment across a statistically significant sample size.
I focused on reducing visual complexity and designing a progressive interaction, while collaborating with the marketing team to ensure consistent messaging across both variants. The engineering team brought the experience to life by building dynamic, responsive field behavior.
The results were decisive:
The progressive disclosure variant led to a 22% increase in new registrations and achieved statistical significance at a 95% confidence level.
A major win and validated our user-first design approach.
This experiment proved that small changes can make a big difference — even a simple tweak to how the form worked led to a big jump in conversions. By reducing the number of choices users saw upfront, the experience felt easier and more approachable. It also showed that progressive disclosure is a really effective way to guide users through critical steps without overwhelming them.
This experiment reinforced the value of evidence-based design. Following the success, we prioritized further experiments to optimize other parts of the user journey. This project, small but mighty, is a reminder that design isn’t just about aesthetics — it's about directly impacting business metrics through thoughtful, user-centered design strategies.
