Membership auto Renewal

I still remember meeting with the BA as I was being on-boarded on to the project. The framing was that this would be a simple checkbox. However, once we gathered requirements and appreciated the real scope… we had something on our hands much bigger than any of us imagined.

Problem Statement

PMI is an association with a global membership with over half-a-million members. The organization’s primary focus is project management certification and membership provides users with discounts on certification exams and opportunities to earn PDUs (Professional Development Units) to maintain their certification.

Stakeholders and Partners

The PMI Membership Automatic Renewal project was a high stakes initiative with a tight turn-around that had sponsorship at the executive level with an Executive Leadership Team steering committee. Our team had a number of different layers and sub-teams working in cross-functional groups including the following:

• Product Owner (PO)
• Project Manager (PM)
• Business Analysts (BA)
• UX
• Developers
• Marketing
• QA

Systems Frameworks

We needed to implement this system into an existing framework of different applications and user experience that were part of an existing user path including the following:

• Sitecore platform (main website)
• Membership Application
• myPMI (user account)
• QMRS (Quick Membership Renewal System, often used by chapters… however, we discovered multiple usability issues during testing which resulted in sponsors killing that product)

Process

The process worked off of a regimented framework with stand-ups three times a week to discuss progress and any blockers. I worked closely with the PO, PM, and BAs every step of the way in the following tracks:

• requirements gathering and documentation (including business rules and edge cases)
• development of user flows
• wireframe builds
• prototypes for review of PO, PM, BAs, Developers
• quantitative and qualitative usability testing (moderated and unmoderated) with prototypes through UserZoom
• UI markups for developers
• documentation of acceptance criteria
• User Acceptance Testing

There were intense debates within the UX Team at our regular meetings discussing the project. There was a forceful opinion that we should be more user-centered by including a checkbox to deactivate auto renewal during the checkout stage (which is not an unreasonable position). The debate was settled when I took the controversy to the Project Manager and he responded that the organization wouldn’t be spending more than US$1M to implement auto renewal if most users would immediately disable it.

To be direct, some of the early wireframes did include some Dark UX patterns to present hurdles to disabling the feature; however… with the more users that we spoke with, it became apparent that greater transparency would likely translate into greater retention.

I iterated through five sets of prototypes on which we conducted remote unmoderated task-based usability studies as well as qualitative user interviews with the talk-aloud protocol; I worked to make auto renew management transparent in order to build and maintain user trust for our 500,000+ member base. It was important that the process look easy to manage and provide a sense of comfort to the user.