Gley.tv: Fixing the funnel that leaked 9 out of 10 signups

Gley's old website had two problems working against each other.

An unclear value proposition. The site didn't explain what Gley actually was. Senior visitors, a core audience, often assumed it was cable TV.

Pricing that confused instead of convinced. Plans differed only by the number of simultaneous streaming devices. Users trained on Netflix expected content tiers, so the plans read as arbitrary.

The analytics made the cost of this concrete:

The brief was a full redesign, from research to a developer-ready, user-tested prototype. I led the project team and owned every design decision end to end.

A third of all visitors left without scrolling past the hero. I had three hypotheses: the hero wasn't interesting enough, the design felt like clickbait to visitors arriving from social ads, or both.

My answer was a cinematic hero. Instead of a static banner with a headline, the page opens like a title sequence: a video showreel of Gley's content plays first, the slogan fades in over it, and the navigation and CTA appear last.

The sequencing was the deliberate part. Delaying the nav and CTA is normally a conversion sin, but here the content itself was the strongest sales argument, so I let it speak before asking for anything. For an audience that associates streaming with television, opening like a movie also answers "what is this?" without a word of explanation.

Did it fix the scroll-off? The directly comparable metric no longer exists: GA4 fires its scroll event at 90% page depth, a far stricter bar than the old "past the hero" measure. What I can read is what the page feeds forward: the homepage carries two thirds of all site views and handed roughly 7,000 users into the registration flow.

The plans couldn't change, so the communication had to. I redesigned the pricing cards around the one real differentiator: the number of devices streaming at once. That line got the visual weight. A title eyebrow named who each plan was for, bullets replaced paragraph text, and an info icon explained immediate billing before the checkout could surprise anyone.

Small changes, but they moved the cards from "what am I paying for?" to a transparent offer. Trust was the actual deliverable here.

The cards earned their validation qualitatively: in the 19 usability sessions, participants worked through plan choice as part of the full signup task, and the issues that surfaced were peripheral details like link visibility, not plan comprehension. The quantitative echo is downstream: plan choice sits in the middle of the flow that a third of arrivals now complete.

Before

After

I started with stakeholder interviews and user research, then condensed the findings into empathy maps. Four areas kept surfacing: onboarding, product features, support, and pricing.

The research settled into three personas:

• Nostalgia Seekers: 45+ fans of regional TV shows and movies. The most delicate segment, and the most likely to mistake Gley for cable.
• Savvy Parents: young families wanting safe, native-language kids' content.
• Domestic Binge-Watchers: viewers of all ages hungry for domestic shows.

I mapped the Nostalgia Seeker journey (persona: Slavcho) through the existing site to find where the path to paying subscriber broke down.

A competitive audit of the major streaming platforms gave me the checklist Gley was failing: clear value proposition above the fold, content organized by category, device compatibility made visible, trust signals like partner logos. None of it was rocket science. All of it was missing.

The registration data pointed to one culprit: the flow demanded email confirmation immediately after entering an email address, sending users out of the funnel and into their inbox mid-signup. Most never came back. Desktop bounce: 89.9%.

I rebuilt the flow so every step keeps the user moving forward:

1. Email & password. Contact info captured first, so even abandoned signups can be retargeted later.
2. Choose a plan.
3. Payment details.
4. Personalization (optional).
5. Email confirmation, at the very end.

The retargeting angle in step one was the business case that sold the change to stakeholders: an incomplete signup stopped being a lost user and became a marketing lead.

This is the decision the Results section measures directly.

An honest caveat first: the analytics setup changed after launch (Universal Analytics to GA4, with different definitions and a fresh property), so there is no clean before/after delta to claim. Instead of comparing incompatible numbers, I measured the new flow on its own terms, with the metric the problem was stated in: completion.

The denominator is everyone who landed on the registration page, motivated or not, not just users who started typing. For a paid flow with a plan choice and payment details in the middle, a third of arrivals finishing is a healthy rate. This is not a newsletter form.

The old flow's defining behavior was instant exit: 89.9% of desktop visitors bounced before doing anything. The new flow's defining behavior is the opposite: a third of the users who reach it finish. The numbers come from different analytics systems, so they read as two portraits, not one delta. The contrast is still the point: a page people fled is now a flow people finish.

This was my first time leading the whole project team, participating in every phase from research to handoff.

The sharpest test came with the hero. Marketing wanted the CTA visible immediately, and every instinct in the agency said don't bury the button. I argued the opposite: for an audience that thought Gley was cable TV, the content had to answer "what is this?" before we asked for anything, even if that meant holding the CTA back a few seconds. It was an uncomfortable call to defend, because if the numbers had gone the wrong way, the delayed button would have been the obvious thing to blame. I made the call, documented the reasoning, and owned the risk.

The flow's completion rate is partly the vindication. But the lesson wasn't that the position happened to be right; it was learning to hold a position I believed in against the room. I left the project trusting my own judgment more, and with the results to justify it.