Mobile Experience for Desktop Apps

Trial download page redesign and new mobile workflow for TechSmith Apps

Camtasia is a desktop app that requires a user to be on their laptop or desktop to download and use but much of our upper funnel advertising is run on mobile phones. The optimal method for our company is for users on mobile to send themselves an email with the information to download later, a pseudo reminder in their work inbox to give our products a try. An email form on the download page automatically sends the user the trial download and they can keep on scrolling with minimal impact on their leisure time.

The valuable mobile user

There are many ways to arrive on the trial download page as its the last step in many of our net-new funnels. Although one net-new funnel is primarily on mobile, through channels like meta ads. These mobile funnels were leaving users stuck with a download cta and with no good way out.

How do you capture mobile users in a funnel designed for desktop viewing and interation?

The (un)happy path means getting stuck with a download too large

If you've ever had to delete photos to update your phone, you know how frustrating it can be to have large and useless files on your iPhone. But for many users, the expected happy path designed for desktop wasn't so helpful when using a phone. On the old download page, users were expected to find a small, inaccessible "send a link" hyperlink under the download buttons, in order to do anything on mobile.

In this case, "send a link" would open an email field for users to receive a download link they could open later, hopefully on their desktop. But significantly more users were leaving the page than taking that step to receive the link later. So why didn't we help mobile users discover what their happy path was?

How might we help mobile users find an action to take when they land on this page?

Customizing for the mobile experience and ditching downloads

The solution seemed pretty obvious. On mobile, change the primary action to the email field, instead of prompting users to download a file they can't use. The first step was testing this design against the old, would changing the primary action increase mobile interaction with the page?

Utilizing a third party testing agency, we learned, in less than a week, that a email field was a game changer for mobile users.

Users were more than 50x more likely to see and use this email field when it was more prominent.

Ux isn't always about discovering the workflow, but just about helping users to.

Some things are just ripe for improvement. There are many solutions to getting a mobile user into a desktop app, and TechSmith already had a solution, but some things could just use a bit of restructuring to make them shine. Someone else had already done the hard work of creating the email system, I just helped users find it.