Crpko Referrals

2025

This is a design of Crpko's referrals experience. Our goal was to design a referral for India, and increase referred first buys (number of referred users who complete their first trade).

Impact: +4% referred first buys.

SIGNUP PAGE REFRESH

As a first step to redesigning referrals, we wanted to look at how we could deliver low-cost optimizations in order to reduce customer support tickets and increase conversion for referral signups.

In addition to making stylistic changes to the signup page, my main priorities were to:

Remove the app up-sell banner at the top because we were taking people away from the main job to be done
Make sure the signup form was visible above the fold, especially on smaller devices

GraphQL for SMS/Whatsapp invite

Since the current prepopulated message we provided was lengthy and hard to parse, I leveraged GraphQL to add a graphic to the SMS invite and partnered with Content to shorten the text copy.

This not only created a more visual and delightful experience, it also provided a better affordance for the invited user.

Visual considerations

We considered other graphics as well but ultimately went with the gift box illustration due to its ability to translate well across locales.

MVP framework

I started out with this intial framework where I added quick social share options in order to reduce friction when inviting. The social share options include popular messaging and social media platforms such as Twitter and WhatsApp.

Users can also see their top 3 most recent invites with the ability to see more. And for additional features such as invite contacts, there’s a sticky CTA at the bottom which will trigger a bottom sheet that will house these features.

User Research

We conducted 10 unmoderated sessions across North America, the EU, and Australia. This was a task-based prototype study where we asked users to invite a friend to join Coinbase and observed their process.

Finding 1

Personalised share options

Almost all participants wanted personalized sharing options.

EU & AUS: WhatsApp
US: Twitter/X, Instagram

Finding 2

Data privacy concerns

Even though it was easy for users to find and invite someone through the contact book, 1/3 participants had concerns around sharing that information with us.

Finding 3

Customized messages

Users preferred to customize their messages

MVP

Based on the findings, I iterated on the framework for our MVP experiment. I partnered with Content and Eng to shorten the terms copy, and build robust social share options that are localized based on the market the user is in to reduce friction.

Scaling

We’ll add a dedicated entry point for users to track and remind their past invite at the top of referrals hub. For contact book and future features, we’d add a sticky CTA at the bottom that will house those options.

Dedicated entry point

A timely change being implemented on the main consumer app was the addition of the "More" menu. This felt like the perfect home for Referrals because unlike other trade-related features, referrals is not a place that's trafficked often.

MVP experiment

Due to timeline constraints, we defaulted back to referral links since back end wasn’t able to finish referral codes in time for this experiment.

Experiment result

After running the experiment for about a week, we saw a slight dip in metrics due to tracking issues, and little engagement on the referral link CTA. We had a few hypotheses as to why there was a dip in the metrics:

Having 1 CTA to copy referral link was likely an unfamiliar interaction pattern
Titles read as two steps you’d have to do one after another
Gifting team’s up-sell caused cognitive overload

Solution & Impact

We defaulted back to using a familiar affordance for copying the referral link, and partnered with Content Design to update the headlines to they read as two distinct steps. After making these changes and re-running the experiment, we saw +4.1% in referred signups, and +$$ in referred first buys.

$$ refers

Global entry point

As a fast follow, leadership wanted a more prominent entry point to access referrals. I explored these three initial directions. We ultimately went with the version that’s next to the bell icon in the header.

Updates & Localization

I updated the designs to leverage our new illustration library, and also worked with the localization team to roll out referrals for countries like Japan.