Led 3-person design team
Zero-to-one
Web 3
The challenge
After COVID, Soho House needed to grow its member base fast. The application form was the only acquisition funnel and more than half of people who started it never reached the end.
The original form was the first ever built for the product and hadn't been redesigned since launch. Digital patterns for onboarding and form design had moved significantly in the years since.
The structural problem: abandoners had never submitted anything, so they left no trace. No email, no session data, nothing to follow up with. We had measurable drop-off and no direct way to understand why.
My role
Senior Product Designer. End-to-end ownership across the full acquisition journey the membership selection page, the application form, and the price calculator added post-launch.
Cross-functional team: PM, front-end and back-end engineers, user researcher, legal, and copywriter. Six to seven weeks, 2020/21. I ran the user testing on the selection page, collaborated with the user researcher on the survey, worked with legal on eligibility logic that shaped the tier system, and directed the copywriter on the open question prompts.
Research approach
Secondary
research
Post-acceptance member survey
(40–50 responses)
Secondary Research
The form hadn't been redesigned since it was first built, years before conversion and form UX research had much to say on the topic. I went through the articles and studies published since, to understand what the field had learned.
It gave me a clearer picture of the problem before I'd spoken to a single user.
Key insights
Cognitive overload
users stop mid-way, even when they intended to finish. When a form feels like too much effort, it's easier to close the tab and come back later.
Smashing Magazine, 2016
Multi-step forms convert significantly better
single-page forms convert at around 10%. Break the same content into steps and that can reach 53%. Most people who drop off aren't disinterested, the design gets in the way.
Venture Harbour; Baymard Institute
Form structure affects whether people finish
a peer-reviewed study comparing single-page, multi-page, and conversational formats confirmed that how a form is structured changes whether users complete it.
Rothenbuehler et al., JMIR, 2021
Working Hypotheses
Before designing the survey, I wrote down what I believed was
happening and why.
Post-Acceptance Member Survey
With no way to contact abandoners, I surveyed newly accepted members people who'd been through the form recently, often after multiple attempts. 40–50 responses.
81%
had started the application more than once
64%
were unsure how much of the form remained
57%
first learned the membership cost near the end
41%
cited concerns about losing progress when returning
Design principles
Why it matters: These insights shaped the MVP scope and structure, prioritising clarity, confidence, and early participation over feature depth.
Principle #1
Earn the ask
show price and expectations before asking for effort
Principle #2
Make progress visible
the form should always feel finite
Principle #3
Design for return
remove the penalty for stopping mid-way
Principle #4
Remove the unknown
every point of uncertainty is a reason to close the tab
Phase 1
Redesigning the Form
Four core interventions, each mapped to a research finding:
Design decisions
I worked with the Creative team to define the visual direction. The goal was an interface that felt credible and calm in a category prone to feeling chaotic. Financial-grade, not crypto-loud.
What Happened
After Launch
Phase 1 shipped. Analytics showed improvement but two patterns emerged that the form redesign alone hadn't solved.
The first was price. Users were now dropping off at step one the membership selection step the moment they saw the cost. The form had stopped losing people at the end. It was losing them at the beginning.
The second was research behaviour. Even with pricing visible, some users were abandoning the form at the membership selection step not because of cost, but because they didn't know which membership was right for them. With four tiers and no way to compare them inside the form, they were closing the tab to go and look it up.
Phase 2
Calculator + Membership Selection Page
Both problems pointed to the same root cause: the form wasn't the right place to make the first contact with price or membership options. That decision-making needed to happen before the application started. Phase 2 addressed both in a single release.
Design metrics
Delphi ran for six months before new leadership decided to absorb prediction markets into the core Cronos app, a strategic decision to scale the feature at platform level. These metrics reflect that full window.
54%
First-trade activation
up from 42% in month two. We introduced a welcome incentive for users who traded within their first 3 days.
43%
second-trade rate
driven by limited-time 2×/3× reward multiplier events, giving users a specific reason to return.
82%
of users who started a trade completed it
After changing the Max button from wallet balance to market maximum, the manual-adjustment drop-off disappeared from screen recordings.
4 min 20 sec
Median time to first trade - Improved alongside trade completion after the Max CTA change. Fewer steps at the moment a user was committing real money.
Learnings
Looking back, Rewards was the most nuanced UX problem in the product. The main flows were the right priority as they were the foundation everything else sat on, but in focusing on getting those right, Rewards didn't get the same depth of thinking it probably needed. Given the chance to do it again, I'd have carved out dedicated time for it earlier in the process rather than treating it as something we'd refine post-launch.
The Discord and screen recording plan was the right call given the constraints. But it shouldn't have been the plan. It should have been the fallback.
