Logged Out Homepage
The Team
Product Designer: Alyssa Welch
Product Design Director: Raphy Fedida
Product Manager: Colleen McClowry
Web Developer: Natalee Anfuso
Client
Reverb, Engage Team
Overview
Our existing Logged Out homepage contained multitudes of content, added to over the course of years by disparate teams. It felt unfocused and wasn’t committed to achieving a singular goal.
Following a successful refresh of the Logged In experience, the Logged Out was scheduled to follow suit, with the goal of activating users who would otherwise become overwhelmed and bounce.
I synthesized stakeholder interviews, existing user research, and thorough competitive research into two variations: one focused on Product goals, and the other expanded to meet Marketing goals.
The Goal
To increase immediate understanding of the marketplace to drive subsequent actions (App download, Favoriting) that would place users in a personalized experience.
Process
User testing
As part of introducing a new hero banner format, it went through a short round of testing to gauge user understanding. With the goal of clearly communicating the business as a two-sided marketplace while still prioritizing the key action of engaging in our search, this prototype was shared with a small group of Reverb users.
The user testing unearthed the following:
- The presence of the “Buy Sell” tab was enough for users to understand the business as a two-sided marketplace
- Users overwhelmingly understood that they were buying and selling with other people, not warehouses
- Users understood Reverb was not selling or purchasing gear
Engineering Handoff
Once designs were ready for handoff, I documented the responsive formatting, detailed evolutions between user types (Strangers vs Acquaintances), and linked to existing system components for our engineering team.
Final Designs
With confidence from our user survey, the team rolled forward Slim and an Expanded versions for testing. The Slim version remained focused on driving our key metrics–app downloads, search engagement, and Favoriting–along with the industry standard category wayfinding to help unfamiliar users jump in. The Expanded version included additional modules intended to communicate broader business goals. For example, both the value props and Deals & Steals modules reinforce Reverb’s commitment to affordably priced music gear. To help new users jump in, it also included a “Best-selling brands” row with the intention of capitalizing on existing brands’ name recognition.
The launch of V1 showed positive results, with increased desktop signups and mobile web engagement (favoriting, searching, and listing purchases). Of the Slim and Expanded versions, we found the Slim to perform better, and hypothesized we could achieve our goals by implementing learnings from this first pass–such as simply including additional clickable elements in the form of product listings.
Impact
While we learned from the experiment, this was rolled back for further iteration. We hypothesize there was a decline in key metrics simply because there were less products to interact with than the control.
Mobile web did perform favorably, but with desktop web’s increased traffic and decreased performance, the project as a whole was rolled back for further iteration. Both expanded and slim versions showed significant lift for signups, however showed declines in other key actions.
significant lift
for key actions of Favoriting, Searching, and Listing Purchases on mobile web
significant lift
for desktop signups
decline
for key actions of Favoriting, Searching, and Listing Purchases on desktop
Using learnings and inferences from this first pass, a second pass was released two months later which eliminated some white space and introduced more curated rows. It was ultimately rolled forward.
