Dropbox's /login and /register pages ran on an outdated design system, disconnected from the rest of Dropbox.com. Sign-ups had declined for several consecutive quarters, and inconsistent login experiences across products (Dropbox, Paper, Replay) were eroding user trust. My goal: unify the experience, cut friction, and reverse the sign-up decline.
I ran customer interviews to understand where people got stuck or lost confidence, and paired that with a competitive audit of SaaS authentication patterns. Two things stood out:
– Inconsistency bred distrust. Users noticed the sign-in flow looked and felt disconnected from Dropbox's core product.
– Competitors offered more secure, lower-friction login and signup options. Email links, QR codes, one-click social login, all things that the current experience lacked.
Unified, Progressive SUSI. I replaced separate sign-up and sign-in flows with a single intelligent flow that detects, from an email address alone, whether a user has an existing account, which removed a decision point and cut confusing error states.
Google One Tap + social sign-in. User research showed Google was the clear preferred third-party auth method, so I designed and tested a one-click Google sign-up/sign-in path, including placement testing (top-right outperformed inline).
Deliberate simplification. I removed a decorative illustration that was competing with the task at hand, and worked with legal to eliminate an unnecessary terms-of-service checkbox, reducing clicks to convert.
I partnered closely with front-end engineers to ship these as live experiments over a two-month period, evaluating results at 30-day checkpoints before rolling out to 75% of traffic.
After running experiments, the following results were achieved:
This project is representative of how I work: pairing direct user research with competitive and analytics context, making deliberate (and testable) simplification calls, and partnering tightly with engineering to validate design decisions against real conversion data.