Kong: Konnect Plus trial

Bringing awareness to the value and power of Konnect Trials

Overview

Kong Konnect is a platform that simplifies the management and scaling of APIs. It uses Kong Gateway, an industry-leading API gateway, to provide a robust and flexible solution for modern application development. Kong Konnect helps businesses connect, manage, and secure their APIs, enabling them to build and deliver digital services more efficiently.

Konnect Plus is a core pricing tier offering, this initiative aims to improve the experience for users trying it via a Trial. Currently, users have low awareness of their trial status, and the hybrid trial model (combining time and credits) creates confusion and friction during the conversion process.

This work would add:

  • Simple Time-Based Trial: Offer a clear 30-day trial period.
  • Soft Cap & Grace Period: Provide a 14-day grace period after the trial’s end to encourage conversion.
  • Conversion Incentive: Offer a significant credit upon conversion to incentivize users to become paying customers.

My Role

As Staff Product Designer, Growth, I took ownership of the design vision and delivery for this 2 month initiative. Working in close partnership with our PM and Engineering Lead, I managed roadmap planning, conducted weekly reviews, mentored team members, and established design best practices to ensure a successful and impactful solution.

Background

Problem: Users don’t know they are in a trial

Looking at the Data

To improve our trial experience, I analyzed user data to understand user actions and pain points, focusing on trial awareness and preventing pay overages. My analysis revealed two key findings: first, new users were largely unaware of their Plus trial status, and second, the lack of transparency led to unexpected feature loss and potential cost increases upon expiration.

My analysis identified the following problems with the Konnect Plus trial:

10%

Customers knew about Trial

~91%

Users didnt know about ‘loan’

~68%

Users wanted the Konnect Plus Trial

Quotes from support requests

“I got an email about my trial expiring? When and who triggered the trial? We didnt realize we had it running and feel like we werent able to properly use it.”

– Konnect customer #1

“What are all these extra costs? I was looking to upgrade to Konnect Plus but it says I owe money?? Why?”

– Konnect customer #2

Competitive Analysis

I compared ~5 products, including our major competitors, aiming to find out what methods they used to promote trial features, capabilities, and upgrade paths. Key findings were:

  • Globalized banners or mentions help reinstate the trial ‘status’ and drive urgency
  • Global upgrade CTAs and Actions can maintain awareness as well as fast routes to convert
  • What’s in a trial is in a trial, no hidden fees. We need to eat the cogs or suggest early conversion, don’t put people into a ‘performance loan’ flow.
  • Ensure we breakdown our costs in easy to read experiences.

Refining our plan

Hypothesis:
By redesigning the Konnect Plus trial and upgrade experience we can reduce friction, improve trial clarity, and surface value more effectively. This will lead to increased user confidence, higher activation rates, and significantly improved trial-to-paid conversion.

User Goals

  • Seamless Onboarding: Users will experience a frictionless and intuitive trial setup, enabling them to swiftly understand their trial parameters and focus on evaluating Konnect Plus’s capabilities.
  • Confident Exploration: Users will have a clear and consistent understanding of their trial status and available features, fostering confidence in their ability to explore and test Konnect Plus.
  • Compelling Value Proposition: Users will immediately grasp the value of Konnect Plus and its relevance to their API development needs, leading to increased adoption and conversion.

Business Goals

  • Drive Accelerated Trial Conversion: Design a trial experience that clearly communicates the value proposition of Konnect Plus features and pricing tiers, leading to a significant increase in conversion rates.
  • Maximize User Activation through Compelling Experience: Design an onboarding flow that instills a sense of urgency and highlights the immediate value of Konnect, driving rapid and widespread user activation.

Goal: Enhance the Konnect Plus trial experience to increase user awareness and conversion.

Expanding the scope

  • Originally the team only wanted to focus on trial mentions throughout the UI, however after my research and reviewing our current UX I decided we need to go even further and redesign our Upgrade flow.
  • Our upgrade flow was run through Stripe and the experience took customers completely out of the Kong Konnect experience. In doing this customers were not presented with enough information about what they were going to be billed.
  • Changing this experience along with updating our billing page gives a more holistic approach to trial and conversions.

Milestone 1: Improving Trial Awareness

The first milestone focused on improving the awareness the Plus Trial’s timeline. Before this moment users were not told when at trial would end beyond emails at the moment of ‘done’ and when the ‘loan’ was getting too high to maintain.

The designs below focus on integrating a clean and minimal global component that informs users of their trial time and provides a quick action workflow to upgrade. Other factors of this work were:

  • Setting a trial duration to 30 days
  • Removing the credit/loan system, when a trial ends it ends
  • Creating a more active alerting campaign, in app as well as via email. The UX below shows the specific moments where we send outreach messages to customers with tips tricks and reasons to upgrade. Trial email moments happen at 30 days remaining, 14 days, 2 days, 24 hrs, expired.

Milestone 2: Improved Upgrade Flow

Milestone 2 addressed user needs for a clear and seamless upgrade path. My design strategy focused on:

  • Providing transparent pricing information.
  • Integrating the checkout experience within Konnect.
  • Making upgrade options easily accessible across the UI.
  • Leveraging trial credits to incentivize conversion and build user confidence.

The Impact

Milestone 1 and 2 released in July 2024

Set the standard for all purchasing and upgrade paths within Konnect.

Saw a rapid improvement for trial awareness and upgrades.

Decreased negative sentiment around ‘loaned credits’

17%

Increase trial upgrades

40%

Decrease in support requests relating to trials

It doesnt end there

What I’ve shown above is a small fraction of my work at Kong. I designed the entire new user onboarding and learning experiences to empower our users to be successfully set up their first Gateway. This work was paramount to Kong’s product-led growth motion and the expansion of its user base.

If you’d like to learn more about my work in Growth or Leading PLG you can reach me at carlthomasiv@gmail.com

Collaborators

  • Hayden Lam – Product Manager
  • Elena Ceseracciu – Engineer
  • Diana Breza – Technical Writer