Buyer's guides

Context

Pepper is a holding which has several platforms around the world, one of which is Dealabs. These platforms each bring together a large community of users sharing deals and submitting them to the vote of that same community. Following this principle, Pepper aims to become the leading global portal for savvy, thrifty consumers. Dealabs has over 1.6 million users to date.

Objectives

Dealabs is a platform where a lot of information is exchanged between users every day, either through discussions or comments under the deals. Unfortunately, once this information is shared and replaced by newer ones, it is quite difficult for a user to find it later.

Another goal of Dealabs is the acquisition of new users via organic traffic, which is one of the biggest sources of traffic for the platform. How might we convert this traffic into new users?

The guides thus try to provide a solution to these two distinct objectives: by gathering this “lost” information within an article, they allow users to easily find and share it on the platform, while acting as a new entry point for traffic from new users coming from search engines.

Research

Finding out how users seek information online in order to save money purchasing services/products, and which are their favorite channels in that matter.

We were already aware, from earlier research within the team, of the overall user journey of a target user’s purchase decision, from the product idea to the actual purchase decision. But this remained at a rather high scale, not allowing me to properly judge the problem.

The objective of this new survey is therefore twofold: to learn more about the search habits of target users, but also to collect useful references for the design of the new functionality, in order to measure the presence of mental models within this target audience.

Semi-structured interviews

Which type of users to recruit?

It was important to recruit participants who were not familiar with the platform, in order to be in line with the target group of the guides, which must above all acquire new users. Between 25 and 45 years old, they also have to regularly shop online.

What do semi-structured interviews consist of?

These interviews, as I conducted them, consisted of two stages:

The first one where I asked the participants about their last online shopping experience where they were able to save money: the scenario, the tools but also the process they encountered. Following the methodology of semi-structured interviews, the script was not fixed: depending on the participant, sometimes much more follow-ups or redirections were needed than with others.

The second was to confirm the results of the first: I asked participants to imagine having to change their mobile operator, their energy provider or a particular service/product, and to show me their process while sharing their screen.

Analysis via “tagging” and the Dovetail tool

The interviews’ analysis is one of the most important steps in the research process. Using the (brilliant) tool Dovetail, the analysis of the raw data from the interviews is done through the process of thematic analysis (a well-known analysis method to identify common themes from qualitative data, requiring to first immerse oneself in the data).

Some brief results:

Some features are essential to content consumption

Table of contents, pros and cons… Some features are enjoyed by users for the help they give with reading.

Which types of users are not likely to reach the guides?

These interviews highlighted some users who will be impossible to reach through these guides.

Major weaknesses of competitors

Omnipresence of ads, too much plain text, autoplay content… I was able to identify examples that should absolutely not be reproduced.

Topics and reference platforms

Check24, Moneysavingexperts and Giga.de are some references. Typical “SEO-oriented” websites are easily dismissed by an average user.

Benchmark

When some of the objectives of a project are acquisition or SEO, there are certain unspoken standards that allow a platform to compete best with its rivals. Design is no exception to this logic, which is why benchmarking the competition is a crucial step in the design process. But apart from SEO issues, benchmarking is a way to get inspired, to evaluate the norm and the mental models of our target users. That’s why I evaluated more than ten different guides: Backmarket, Moneysavingexperts or Pricerunner are some examples.

The result of this analysis was a set of functionalities and interface design characteristics specific to this type of editorial content. Alongside the interviews, future improvements to the buyer’s guides became obvious to me, as did the desire to highlight what makes Dealabs strong, namely its deals.

Design

Article - guide

For the sake of design consistency and ease of development, we decided to reuse the basic typography and design of the platform. However, I wanted to make some changes to the layout and typography to improve the readability of the whole. In particular, there are some graphic rules to respect regarding editorial web pages:

• A fairly short container width, in parallel with a rather large font size, to avoid overly long sentences and improve readability;
• A fairly high line height, generally around 160%, in order to make text-rich paragraphs more harmonious.

Guides listing

I also needed to design a page that could list the guides, which would allow them to be accessible not only via Google and its potential new users, but also through the platform itself and its current users.

First of all, I had to create a “card”, based on the model of libraries like Material Design, so that the two most important elements for recognizing the guide’s theme are highlighted: the title and the image.

In order to draw the user to the most recent guide, I decided to have a larger version of the basic card developed, still focusing on the most important elements for understanding the topic.

Putting the two elements together, here is the final result. A categorization of the guides is under development, which will allow the numerous guides to be ordered by theme and thus make searching easier.

How to make sure a new feature is named correctly?

Alongside the interface design, we had to find a name that would be both understandable to users and suitable for editorial staff, for the German, French and English platforms. My Product Manager and I decided to proceed in three steps:

1. A thorough benchmark of competing or similar platforms, in order to create a shortlist of potential names.
2. Internal research: we presented this shortlist to stakeholders, who expressed their needs and preferences.
3. A user survey: we asked our users which name, among the two favorites, is the most appropriate.

Let’s look at the survey itself:

The aim was to understand whether our naming proposals were clear enough to our users and which one would be the most appropriate. From the previous steps came two alternatives per country: Guides or Guides d’achat in French, Guides or Buyer’s guides in English, Ratgeber or Magazin in German.

Two surveys corresponding to the two proposals per country were submitted to about a hundred users each.

• We are working on a new section called “Guides” / “Buyer’s guides”. Based on this name, what do you expect from this section? What information do you expect to find in a “guide”?
• Our “Guide” includes information that aims to help users with their purchases, such as tutorials, product news… Do you think the name “Guide” fits this section?
• If you had to name it differently, what would you name this section?

Results:

An interesting finding from the survey analysis was that many users thought they would expect an FAQ if the feature were to be called “Guides”. For example, one user wrote “Explanations on how the site works, alerts, messaging…etc”. This observation allowed us to choose the name “Buyer’s guides” with full knowledge of the facts.

More broadly, I would say that a user survey can, as in this example, help resolve an impasse arising from the impossibility of deciding between several divergent stakeholder opinions. Standing as the guarantor of the user’s opinion gives greater legitimacy and more weight in the decision-making process.