Font licensing sucks!

Challenging simplicity in product design

In a $20B global font market where piracy and free alternatives threaten revenue, Monotype faced a critical challenge: how to simplify licensing while increasing paid licensing in a market resistant to complexity.

Monotype’s Creative License was going to be a new, simplified model for licensing fonts that delivered more value for designers by expanding license usage to include more applications. However, the core principles of the Creative License (simplicity and value) didn’t resonate with designers and the experience didn’t align with their mental models. In fact, It actually created more friction through the perception of limited, un-scalable licensing options. These insights, along with low conversions, forced Monotype to abandon the new license structure, ultimately preventing lost revenue. Let’s dig in…

License details were initially unclear and overlooked

My research explored three key questions: How do designers currently make font purchasing decisions? What mental models guide their licensing expectations? And what specific friction points prevent conversion?

The design team’s hypothesis was that the license verbiage was unlear and leading to poor conversions.
I conducted 15 unmoderated usability sessions with professional designers across agency, in-house, and freelance contexts, combining task analysis with retrospective interviews to understand both behaviors
and attitudes.

Analysis revealed three critical barriers to conversion: information hierarchy issues that obscured options, unclear licensing limitations creating perceived risk, and most critically, a fundamental mismatch between the new model and established industry mental models.

People were confused

For the next iteration (see fig B), participants simulated the font buying experience in moderated sessions. The study revealed a host of new issues. The descriptive copy still did not instill buying confidence, participants feared the license would not be able to scale to their needs, and there was a noticeable increase in cognitive load when trying to understand the nuances of the new license model.

But the big A-HA came when we discovered that the Creative License wasn’t actually the problem after all.
The barrier to adoption for the Creative License to succeed was that by introducing it, we were modifying the entire licensing model in order to accommodate it. This new model didn’t align with participants’ mental models of existing licensing structures that had become commonplace in the design industry.

In addition to these new insights, we discovered that the existing license structure was actually converting more poorly than the previous structure (see fig c). It was recommended that the previous license structure—where all available licenses were clearly visible and defined—be re-instated as it led to the highest conversion rates.

Though initially resisted, our evidence-based recommendation to return to the proven license structure was eventually implemented, resulting in increased conversions and demonstrating how research can drive long-term business decisions even through organizational resistance.