The Financial Times

Gifting & Family Plan Subscription Offer

UX design discovery for new subscription journeys, including gifting flows and family plans within the FT paywall.

  • Web
  • UX Design
  • B2C
  • Project Info  +
  • Project Info –
FT Strategies

Gifting & Family Plan Subscription Offer

Background

Many UK and US universities offer group subscriptions to their students. However, once graduates leave, there's no bridging mechanism to keep them subscribed as they enter the world of work.

The FT is committed to making subscriptions easier to maintain as users pass through key life stages.

Approach

I began with a competitive audit to better understand how rival media outlets structure their paywall propositions.

From this, we identified two promising directions: an FT gift subscription — ideal for graduates and young professionals — and a family plan to broaden and sustain the paying user base.

Outcome

I wireframed UX journeys for both the Gifting and Family Plan propositions.

The project also surfaced the need for a full subscription audit — ensuring all subscription types, user journeys and pricing tiers are properly mapped within a clear, competitive structure.

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The FT has enjoyed a solid user base of loyal paying professionals due to their superb journalism and markets insight. The FT can be consumed via print (week and weekend variations), digital and a combination of both. They also offer standard and premium digital subscriptions, together with smaller subscriptions (like the 'FT Edit').

These subscriptions are all geared towards experienced professionals and organisations.

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The FT does offer subscriptions to universities. However, when students complete their studies and leave university to enter the job market, the FT subscription they once had, is no more.

With other major news media outlets offering family and gift subscriptions as a membership option, this seems like a perfect direction for the FT to press ahead with. It would go some way to maintain the relationship with younger adults as they move into their professional life - and by offering a 'gift' subscription, this would enable parents or family members to easily pay for their childs subscription.

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I mapped out what the FT Family Subscription journey could look like, together with providing UX Designs using already existing FT components.

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And likewise with the Gifting journeys - I provided a UX journey map, marketing and payment flow pages for the new subscription offer.

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