WTFast Activation Redesign

How an Onboarding Redesign Tripled Payment Conversion by Increasing Activation by 400%

1. The Context: A Growth Crisis Hiding in Plain Sight

WTFast is a successful SaaS product for gamers, using proprietary network optimization to reduce ping and improve online gaming performance across titles like League of Legends, Fortnite, and Valorant. The product had a loyal, passionate user base—but there was a critical problem bleeding the business dry.

The Red Flag:

• Conversion rate: unsustainably low. Most free trial users churned within 24 hours.
• Symptom: Users would download the app, open it once, and never return.
• Business Impact: Growth had stalled. Acquisition costs were climbing through partnerships and ads, but activation wasn’t improving. The top of the funnel was healthy—the bottom was broken.

The company had spent years optimizing for retained users—advanced network diagnostics, detailed performance metrics, granular server controls. But for someone opening the app for the first time? It was overwhelming, confusing, and offered no clear path to experiencing value.

My hypothesis: The “bleeding” was at first contact. We were losing users before they ever experienced what made the product worth paying for.

2. The Mission: Fix Activation or Die Trying

I proposed a focused initiative built around a single North Star metric: Activation Rate (the percentage of new users who successfully use the product’s core feature in their first session).

The Plan:

1. Investigate the “why” of churn through deep behavioral analysis.
2. Define a strategy to eliminate friction in the first-time user experience.
3. Design a new onboarding flow (FTUE) that guaranteed a “quick win.”

This wasn’t about making things prettier. It was about survival. If we couldn’t get new users to experience value, the business would continue to bleed money on acquisition with no ROI.

Where I Started:

I didn’t open Figma. I opened the session recordings.

3. The Investigation: 2000 Sessions, One Devastating Pattern

I analyzed over 2000 failed user sessions using an internal JS recording tool, watching real users struggle in real-time. What I found was a pattern so consistent, so predictable, it was almost painful to watch.

The User Journey to Failure:

1. Download: User installs WTFast, excited to reduce lag in their game.
2. First Launch: App presents two options: “Automatic Mode” (let WTFast choose the best server) or “Manual Mode” (choose from 200+ servers).
3. The Fatal Choice: 70% of users ignored the automatic recommendation and clicked “Manual Mode.” Why? They wanted control. They didn’t trust the algorithm.
4. Cognitive Overload: Faced with a dropdown list of 200+ server locations (“Dallas 1,” “Dallas 2,” “Los Angeles 5,” “Singapore 12”), they froze. Which one is best? What’s the difference?
5. Abandonment: Average time to app close: 45 seconds. They never tried the product.

The company thought: “Power users love manual control, so we should make it prominent.”
The data showed: “New users want control but don’t have the knowledge to use it effectively, so they panic and leave.”

But Then I Found Something Worse.

While watching sessions, I noticed a disturbing trend: Users who did try the automatic mode were sometimes routed to bizarre servers. A player in New York connected to Singapore. A European player routed through Brazil. Performance improvements were inconsistent—sometimes ping got worse.

I brought this to the engineering team. “Why is the automatic mode routing users incorrectly?”

After investigation, we uncovered a critical, systemic bug: The ping test WTFast used to detect the “best” server was so aggressive that many ISPs were flagging it as suspicious traffic and blocking it. This returned false latency data, causing the algorithm to recommend the wrong servers.

The product was actively sabotaging new users.

The UX problem wasn’t just “bad interface design.” It was a broken technical foundation masked by an overwhelming UI. Fixing the UI alone wouldn’t save activation if the underlying product was failing users.

4. The Solution: A Two-Pronged Attack

I collaborated with engineering to design a solution that addressed both the technical bug and the UX friction.

Part A: Fix the Foundation (Engineering + Design)

The Bug Fix:
Engineering adjusted the ping test algorithm to be less aggressive, preventing ISP blocks and ensuring accurate server recommendations.

The Design Layer:
While the ping test ran (now correctly), I designed a loading screen that transformed the wait from “awkward silence” to “perception of power.” The screen displayed: “Analyzing global network… Detecting optimal route… Calculating best server…”

This wasn’t just decoration—it communicated value and set expectations. Users felt they were receiving sophisticated, personalized optimization, not just waiting for a generic process to finish.

Part B: The Onboarding Redesign (FTUE Wizard)

Instead of choice paralysis (200 servers), I designed a linear, guided wizard that guaranteed success:

Step 1: Region Selection

• From 200 servers → Just pick your country and where is the server of the game, gamers usually know this information.
• Principle: Reduce cognitive load. Users don’t need perfect control—they need good enough with zero effort.

Step 2: Game Detection (The “Magic” Moment)

• Automatically detect installed games (League of Legends, Valorant, etc.).
• Principle: Show intelligence. This feels personalized and saves time.

Step 3: One-Click Activation

• A single, prominent button: “Launch Game”
• Principle: Remove all other choices. Force users into the happy path—they can explore advanced options later, after they’ve experienced value.

The new flow took less than 30 seconds and guaranteed that every user would successfully connect, launch their game optimized, and experience a tangible ping reduction on their first try.

5. The Result: 4X Activation, 3X Revenue

We launched the redesign via A/B testing to validate impact before full rollout.

The Results Were Staggering:

• Activation Rate: From 10% to 50% → +400% increase
  • 5X more users experiencing the core value in their first session.
• Trial-to-Paid Conversion: Tripled (+200%)
  • Users who experienced value were far more likely to convert to paying customers.

Business Impact:
The redesign didn’t just improve metrics—it fundamentally changed the unit economics of the business. Acquisition costs stayed the same, but the ROI per new user tripled. This unlocked budget for further growth initiatives and partnerships (including a global sponsorship with a Riot Games E-Sports Team for League of Legends).

6. Key Learnings

Behavior > Opinion: Observe Actions, Not Words

Users rarely articulate their real problems. They don’t say “I don’t understand the onboarding”—they simply close the app within 45 seconds. This taught me that qualitative feedback (surveys, interviews) must be complemented with behavioral data. Watching 2000+ session recordings revealed patterns that users themselves couldn’t describe: cognitive overload when facing 200 server options, confusion during the ping test, and abandonment at the exact moment they needed clarity most.

Takeaway: Build observational research into your process. Use session recordings, heatmaps, and funnel analytics to understand the gap between what users say and what they do. The friction is often invisible until you watch it happen.

Design + Engineering: Cross-Functional Collaboration Unlocks Hidden Value

The biggest win didn’t come from a UI redesign—it came from understanding the technical architecture well enough to discover a critical bug. By working closely with engineers and asking “why” the ping test behaved erratically, I uncovered that ISPs were blocking our aggressive network testing, causing false data that routed users to the wrong servers.

This collaboration transformed the problem from “users don’t understand the UI” to “the product is actively sabotaging itself.” The solution required both a technical fix (adjusting the ping algorithm) and a design intervention (the loading screen that communicated value during the wait).

Takeaway: Don’t treat engineering as a black box. Learn enough about the technical constraints to ask informed questions. Often, the biggest UX improvements come from fixing what’s under the hood, not just what’s on the screen.

Activation as the North Star Metric

Instead of optimizing for every possible metric, we focused on one: Activation Rate (users experiencing core value within their first session). This singular focus aligned the entire team and made trade-offs clearer. Every design decision was evaluated against: “Does this help more users reach their first ‘win’?”

Takeaway: Identify your product’s critical moment of value and ruthlessly optimize for it. In growth design, a user who never experiences your core value will never convert—no matter how polished the rest of your funnel is.