About legacy
Legacy offers sperm testing & freezing services to folks undergoing gender-affirming care therapy, vasectomy, cancer treatment or simply wanting to preserve their healthiest sperm in order to found a family later in life.
Freeze
your sperm
The old freezing page was performing poorly. Conversion rates were below site average and bounce was high.
Responsibilities
Research
Design
Copy strategy
Challenges
Designing a page that can be used as both a landing page and further information, covering the entire conversion funnel
Going against best practices in the service of your own design problems
Key learnings
Purchasing a healthcare product isn't your standard online transaction
Longer purchasing cycles fundamentally change how you market a product
Testing with real prospective customers can get you very valuable data, cheaply and quickly
Using simple, first-degree language is necessary in the context of an unaware customer
Results
Doubled conversion on the page (from below 1% to 2%)
Uncovering
the problem
Egg freezing is a commonly-known and frequently discussed procedure for those assigned women at birth. However, for sperm producing folks, sperm freezing is still an unknown.
80%+
of people who are likely to need to freeze their sperm know about sperm freezing.
Part of Legacy's mission was to change the misconceptions around sperm freezing and making it as ubiquitous as egg freezing.
The "before"
The page has historically been poor performing—lower than the 1% global conversion rate on the website—despite being focused on selling the product.
The previous Freezing page was designed to be product-forward, taking a lot of cues from standard e-commerce playbooks. Above the fold benefits, establishing trust via press appearances, etc.
Purchasing a healthcare product isn't your standard online transaction. It's a longer, more deliberate cycle. Folks are making choices about their future. There's greater price elasticity and customers are likelier to prioritize the correct solution for then rather than the price.
Key learning
There's greater price elasticity and customers are likelier to prioritize the correct solution over the price.
In order to improve and convert potential customers, this meant Legacy had to educate better.
Through user interviews and surveys, questions that weren't being answered were surfaced as blockers in this purchasing process.
"Can I freeze at home?"
"What keeps my sperm alive during transit?"
"Can I donate it to a friend?"
Key learning
This isn't so much a learning but more of a reminder. When you're in deep, it can become easy to lose sight of the big picture and get rid of your biases.
Testing with users unfamiliar with your brand or services will help you get the right temperature very quickly.
Covering all the steps of the conversion funnel by properly educating prospective clients will lead to a better global conversion rate.
In its previous state, the page only served the product-aware part of the conversion funnel.
In order to properly educate prospective customers, we need to hit on all those notes.
Unaware
The customer doesn't know about the problem.
Problem aware
The customer is aware of the problem but doesn’t know how to fix it.
Solution aware
The customer understands there is a solution, but doesn’t know how to do it.
Product aware
The customer knows the product or products available to solve the problem but hasn’t yet chosen one.
Most aware
The customer has purchased the product.
The hero video
We’ve been making a move to video on the web and it’s been paying off. It’s been performing well on the home page and the clinicians page and we definitely think it’s the way to go.
The hero video is meant to plant the seed (ha) that things one might never think would affect their fertility can actually significantly hurt your chances. We want to say “Hey, if you freeze your sperm, you can do all these things and be a parent too.”
"You should freeze
your sperm if"
Legacy has a history of using complicated or overly second-degree language. The hypothesis here is that by using plain language and being extremely clear about why you should freeze (and using exactly those words), we’ll convey the idea better.
Key learning
Using simple, first-degree language is necessary in the context of an unaware customer.
The user should now have a better understanding of the problem. We then introduce the solution: Legacy, an at-home sperm testing kit.
How to freeze your
sperm with Legacy
By distilling the steps of ordering and using the kit into 5 simple steps, we ease prospective customers into the idea that it’s a quick and easy process. If they want to know more, they can go to the more comprehensive How it Works page.
The science of
sperm freezing
Customers don't know the processes and the lengths Legacy goes to ensure the safety of the sample.
As part of Legacy's positioning as a science-first company, it's important to not be afraid of answering the complex questions.
We then segue into Legacy’s value proposition compared to a traditional clinic. By clearly demonstrating the cost-effectiveness and ease of use, users should now be closer to moving to the consideration stage.
Finally, we showcase our biggest types of personas, telling users “this is for you and there are others like you.” These lead to specific persona pages containing resources and solutions for those journeys.
With the previous education, users should now have an understanding of sperm freezing and why it might be for them. It’s now time to move them towards product awareness.
We lead to two different pathways to cover different mental models—those who like exploring on their own, and those who wish to be guided.
We introduce Legacy’s three most popular freezing bundles in a comparison grid so that they may parse the information on their own while also gaining an understanding of how the bundles work. They are based on timeline and family size, so it’s up to users to determine for themselves if these products are the right fit or not.
The comparison grid was a major piece of the puzzle. Historically, the products were presented using product cards, inspired by e-commerce best practices.
However, since they were presented so soon in the page and described the contents of the bundles without explaining them, customers were totally lost.
Through our research, and historical failures using those standard practices, we realized that Legacy was essentially selling insurance — that was a big "ah-ha!" moment. From that moment on, it became a lot easier to understand how we should be explaining and selling our product.
Key learning
A phrase I used a lot to remind myself and the team was: "we're not selling t-shirts". We had to find our own solutions for our business and user needs, even in the face of tried and true best practices.
And that’s it—at this point, prospective clients should have a good understanding of the problem, how we solve it, and the product offering that shapes that solution.
Now that we've executed on our hypotheses, let's see how it performed.
The wins
3/6 users mention they like the brand - this means what we’re doing with the brand is inspiring trust.
“I really like the visual aesthetic of legacy, the color scheme, the fonts, it makes me feel like I’m walking into a real life clinic that’s really well run”
“I like the animation, I’m a big fan of websites that use live videos”
“I do like the layout and the colors, the white background and forest green is beautiful”
5/6 had a rudimentary understanding of sperm freezing at first, 1 said he knew nothing and mostly associated it with sperm donation.
1 knew about the decline of sperm health with age
1 gave the vasectomy use case as an example
1 understood it as an insurance policy, reflecting the proactive freezer (and asks if it can be covered by insurance)
6/6 mention the vast majority of the information is new to them.
6/6 mentioned answer nothing is confusing.
“everything in the page communicates information really well, really simply as well”
“nothing is confusing, it explains everything very very well”
“nothing is confusing, it’s written in a very cohesive language, it’s very easy to understand”
“the website is very informative, very easy to understand”
5/6 contributors mentioned they had no unanswered questions about sperm freezing.
One had questions about bundle customization. “can you mix and matchsome of this? can you do the standard but then add advanced analysis? or are these packages rigid?”
Later in the questionnaire, when asked to describe their understanding of sperm freezing in their own words, 6/6 get it right.
One even mentions proactive freezing, which we don’t touch on a whole lot.
For their next steps, 2/6 say they would take the quiz, and 4/6 would go deeper and go to PDPs.
6/6 mention they are drawn to the bundles comparison table section.
“I like the layout of the options, it’s easy to understand what’s included in each plan”
Further improvements
1 user mentions “I don’t foresee anything happening to me so this might not be for me, but if anything happens this is certainly something I would consider”
We know this already, we haven’t cracked that nut just yet, but we fail to convince potential proactive freezers.
1 user mentions he’s interested in seeing data for the decline with age.
We need to figure out this part of the messaging, I feel like we still don’t know very well if stats and numbers are important to people.
1 user had a question about the possibility of only testing.
We need to consider if we want to mention testing here, balance user needs versus business goals. If we’re prioritizing freezing, then we can allow a little friction and let users figure out where they can find testing on the site.
All in all, I don’t see any need for big changes, I think this page is going to perform well. I’m confident about applying the same recipe to the testing page.
While we explain very well what sperm freezing is and why you should do it (especially with our examples and personas), I think it’s confirmed we should next look at how we can reach proactive freezers.
After the successful round of user testing, the page was deployed and we immediately saw an improvement in perfomance.
Conversion rate had doubled.
Good results are nice, but it's always about the learnings.
Key learnings
Purchasing a healthcare product isn't your standard online transaction.
Longer purchasing cycles fundamentally change how you market a product.
Testing with real prospective customers can get you very valuable data, cheaply and quickly.
Using simple, first-degree language is necessary in the context of an unaware customer.
Best practices aren't gospel. Sometimes you have to find your own design solutions tailored to your problem.