Espresso Guest Conversion
The Situation
Expresso bikes lived in gyms. The people riding them were squeezing workouts into tight schedules, often without a planned account creation on their to-do list. If they didn't sign in before they rode, the ride disappeared. No tracking, no progress, no leaderboard data. The off-bike experience, the part that drove long-term retention, was invisible to anyone who hadn't already committed to the ecosystem.
The business knew account conversion was low. The working assumption was that the signup touchpoint was in the wrong place. Get it in front of users at the right moment, and conversion would follow.
That assumption wasn't wrong. It just wasn't the whole problem.
Expresso vision—immersive fitness experience
What I found
Product was exploring where to inject the signup prompt to improve conversion. The ride selection screen was the only current entry point, and it was easy to miss in the top right corner. The post-ride moment was an obvious candidate. So were a handful of others.
I looked at the form itself.
It was asking for too much. First name, last name, email, password, and whatever else had accumulated in the spec over time. At the end of a workout, with a schedule to keep, that's not a signup form. It's a reason to leave. It didn't matter where we placed it. If the form stayed as-is, we were optimizing the location of a problem instead of fixing it.
The real question wasn't where to ask. It was what was the minimum we could ask and still create a usable account.
Touchpoint Opportunities
The constraints conversation
I pushed engineering on minimum viable account data: what does the system actually need to create an account and associate a session with it?
The answer was an email address. One field, kick off a temporary password via email, let the user complete their profile later from a less time-pressured context.
The placement decision
With the form reduced to a single field, the placement conversation got a lot easier. We mapped every touchpoint where a user might encounter the signup prompt: dashboard, start of ride, during ride, HUD at end of ride, post-workout screen.
We evaluated each one together and landed on the post-ride moment as the most frictionless. The user had just finished something. The value proposition was immediate and concrete: here's what you just did, give us your email and we'll save it. No abstract pitch about leaderboards and progress tracking. Just a direct, honest ask at the exact moment the ask made sense.
What shipped
A post-ride account creation flow built around a single email address field. New users could convert in seconds and return later to complete their profile.
The form went from 1:30 to 2:00 minutes of input down to seconds. The ask matched the moment. Users who would have walked away from a full form had a reason to give us one piece of information and come back to the rest later.The project also reinforced something I've found true across a lot of work: when conversion is low, the instinct is to find a better moment. Sometimes the moment is fine. Sometimes the thing you're asking people to do in that moment is just too hard.
The project also reinforced something I've found true across a lot of work: when conversion is low, the instinct is to find a better moment. Sometimes the moment is fine. Sometimes the thing you're asking people to do in that moment is just too much.