Summary
Highlighting how we identified issues with the Promotion Feature of the application, and enhanced it, resulting in a 3.5-fold increase in user engagement.
Vaset Kala is a second-hand shop app like eBay. There are two sides of users: sellers and buyers. Sellers upload their products, and buyers can reach out to them to make a deal after checking out the product. Promoting an advertisement is one way sellers can boost their product sales.
We had a method for promoting a post for sellers. For a fee, users could use a feature to highlight their posts with a different look, as shown below. This approach is common in second-hand shop apps, but unfortunately, not many users took advantage of it for promotion. It didn't work out well for us.
Problem
We looked into this feature using tools like Google Analytics and Hotjar. What we found was that users were skipping these steps. This insight highlighted a pattern of behavior where users were not engaging with this feature of the platform as expected.
Why?
We used the Heuristic Evaluation method to find the main issue.
System Status Visibility:
When users click on promotion, they can't see any changes, which is a significant problem.
To address this, we conducted a user test with individuals unfamiliar with the feature. We asked them to create a post with a promotion, which was straightforward. However, many didn't grasp the feature and questioned its value, saying, "We don't understand what this option does and why we should pay for this."
Solution
We realized the issue was caused by a poor presentation of this feature, so we decided to redesign this page for clarity. Our goal was to create an interaction where users, upon activating this feature, easily understood its benefits over the simple post.
Design
After a lot of sketching, we reached a new design. To ensure effectiveness, we applied the Heuristic Evaluation with a focus on Visibility of System Status for our solution one more time. Our aim was for users to quickly preview their final promoted post on the page, with a checkbox positioned below the screen.
This design offers several benefits:
They can distinguish between promoted ads and regular ones.
Seeing their actual product image gives users a sense of ownership.
The interaction is visually appealing.
Analyze
We conducted another usability test with different users. This time, we set up a scenario where they were asked to create promoted ads and then explain what they understood about them. Through this test, we found that all users were able to create promoted ads and grasp the difference between promoted ads and regular posts.
Conclusion
After testing during the beta phase, we launched the feature. The results were impressive; users showed significant engagement with the feature. In conclusion, we were able to boost user engagement and, notably, the conversion rate. Upon analysis, we observed a 3.5-fold increase from before. Prior to the redesign, the feature was used around 2 times a day on average, but after the redesign, this number increased to an average of 7 times a day.