Rebtern

Posts from a product design intern at Rebtel

First thoughts after the first week

Its been a week, and so far my time at Rebtel has been filled with meeting coworkers, paper prototypes, and the checkout funnel. Learning everyone’s names is going to take a while but I’m already working on an interesting project improving the user retention of our checkout funnel.

We’re facing a problem that many other companies face: as soon as we ask customers to create an account we lose a huge percentage of them. Solving the problem has so far involved multiple tests, prototypes, and a sketch file with an ever-growing number of artboards. While we’re starting with small fixes — improved copy and a couple trust-inducing additions — my favourite part of the project has been exploring the big changes that could be implemented later on. How can we ask customers for their personal information in a way that is both trustworthy and efficient, and how would that work on mobile?

While this week has been challenging, its also been enjoyable and I’m already looking forward to Monday.

Week Two: Epic Conversions

Two weeks in and the ideas we had to improve the checkout funnel have turned into multiple sprints. The first is done, the second is almost built, and we are about to start user testing a third. The fourth is 50% vague ideas and 50% rough drafts that will all change once the results are in after the second sprint. The hope is that we (the conversion epic team) can convince more of our customers to stay.

My days this week have been full — there’s always something to do. At lunch today I joined our football team for the weekly match against iZettle. They beat us by a large margin but it was a great game and there were times we dominated. Hopefully next week we’ll win (though apparently that has never happened).

Third week’s the charm

The first checkout build is launched, and results are starting to come in. From user testing there have been a couple insights that I wasn’t expecting — some that were even the exact opposite of what I expected. Its surprisingly uncomfortable to sit through user videos, I didn’t think I was emotionally attached to my designs but it turns out I am. Throwing that pride out the window and paying attention to what users say and do has been incredibly rewarding. The design decisions I make for the next sprint will be based on fact, and have a greater impact than those I made based on assumptions.

The challenge for next week will be taking what I’ve learned and implementing it in a way that will increase conversion by more than a couple percent.

Week Four: Prototypes and Waiting

User test results are in, but A/B tests take two weeks to get conclusive results so this week has required a different challenge than the one I expected.

One of the senior designers recently introduced me to Framer, a prototyping tool that uses coffeescript, and I’m a little bit obsessed. Coffeescript is simplified javascript, its easy to pick up and anything you’re missing can be found in Framer’s documentation. Framer itself is very similar to Processing in that it strikes a good balance between programming and visuals. It gives you more control than tools like InVision or Axure but doesn’t take as much time as real web development. Its also open source!

As a part of the checkout project I’ve been redesigning the different states our input fields go through (idle, complete, error, disabled, etc.). It doesn’t sound very exciting, but its fun to take such a detailed look at the user experience of our website. Input fields are one of the most important parts of the site — if they’re difficult to understand they can block customers from purchasing.