Redesign of our Referral Experience
Why & how we redesigned our referral experience and what user sentiment taught us about design impact
On a typical afternoon, when you’re scrolling through Instagram, you see an ad for a t-shirt store. Although you’ve been looking for some trendy summer tees, you still skip the ad. Why?
You’re walking around the market and see a new restaurant, pause for a moment, and then start walking again, even though you’re hungry. Why?
Perhaps you notice many brands invest in having ambassadors, and so much money seems to go into hiring a celeb, influencer, or community leader. Why?
It is all about trust. Even though some brands might have great ads, it may not be sufficient to build confidence to use a product. Then what makes us use these brands and their products?
Research says 92% of consumers trust recommendations from friends and family over any type of advertising (source). This behavior drives referral marketing, one of the most effective types of marketing to acquire new customers. It can do wonders if used right.
So here’s talking about why & how we redesigned the referral flow for Shopsy and the business impact of our new design.
What is Shopsy?
Shopsy from Flipkart is a go-to app for budget-friendly shopping in fashion, beauty, mobiles, footwear, and accessories at the best prices — as low as ₹5.
It is also one of the leading reselling platforms in India, helping Indian women, students & retailers generate 🤑 income, all while sitting in the comfort of their homes. (Learn here about reselling)
🏆 By the way, it’s been the no. 1 free app on the Google Play Store. (Check here)
Why was there a need to redesign?
To listen to our users, we often visit our Google Play store reviews and support tickets to solve their pressing problems.
We noticed an upward 📈trend in negative sentiments around referrals and upon further analysis, we found that it was contributing 9.87% to the overall negative sentiment for our app. While looking deeper at our support escalations around referrals, we understood some new set of problems and it opened up questions with different perspectives.
This was a strong indication for us to invest in the referral experience.
User problems:
After going through the Google Play store reviews & support escalations we identified three main themes to focus on when solving the problem:
- Communication: Users were not getting how the program works (you’ll soon find out why)
- Money on hold: Those who had successfully referred a friend still didn’t get their reward money (sit tight and relax, you’ll know soon why)
- User flow gaps: There was no way to check the status of the different referrals
Business problem:
Being a year-old platform, one of our business goals is to keep acquiring new users through multiple strategies; one of them being referral marketing. And due to the issues that we discussed above, we started noticing a downtrend in referral acquisition.
How did the old design look?
New designs
👉 Check out the designs on dribbble in rich pixels
Let’s break the design further component by component and see what changed and why!
Top banner
- Simplification of copy — We simplified the main punchline of the page. We moved content to the left side to make it easier for users to scan the content (As the human eye scan English text from left to right)
- Newer illustration — Instead of using a human character, we switched to money related graphic to motivate the user (We used a coin image with a rupee symbol to keep the consistency as we are using the rupee symbol in other places to communicate real money)
- Brand personality — We used our brand color for the background so the page feels more like a part of the Shopsy family
Reward widget
- We removed the text above total rewards as it was very hard to read (The text was also jargon-heavy and had incomplete information about how the referral program works)
- On the same page, the earned amount was being called both a “reward” and a “bonus”
- We removed the section to see the number of friends referred to make it more focused on their reward earnings (since at first glance users just want to see their earnings)
- Merged ‘Add bank detail’ widget with reward widget (proximity)
How it works
- We improved the typography and made the section cleaner
- We simplified the referral communication into three small steps
- We removed all the imagery as it was not serving any purpose and used relevant icons so that it’s faster to read & scan the steps
FAQ section
- We decided to use accordion instead of taking the user to a different page so they can quickly go through the answers
- We also decided to club relevant questions together (to reduce the size of the long list)
- As the name suggests, frequently asked questions needed more focus, so we decided to keep most asked questions upfront (others would sit inside the ‘see all FAQ’ page)
Primary CTA
We made WhatsApp sharing the primary option and others secondary (Our hunch was that most of the users refer on WhatsApp so we checked the data and found that 75% of users were referring on WhatsApp)
Tracking of referral status
Earlier, one very important user flow was missing where users can check which friend has signed up or which one has placed an order so that they can nudge friends accordingly, hence we designed this new flow to track the status of a referral.
Outstanding balance
Before, there was no communication of successful referrals if the user hadn’t added bank details. So we designed a new state where, after a successful referral, we strongly nudge the user to add bank details and called it ‘outstanding balance’.
🎉 Wins & celebrations
- With all our changes, we reduced negative sentiment around referrals on the Google Play store from 9% to 2.4%
- Our acquisition number got increased by 2X in one month after the launch
- Referrer to referee ratio increased by 2X (for any referral program, the referrer to referee ratio is an important metric as it shows on average how many new customers are getting acquired from one referrer)
❤️ Thank you!
If you have read till here, you might have observed how we keep our customers in the center of everything we do & how good design is directly proportional to good business. You can never guess what a customer wants. The only way to find out is by listening to them.
That’s all for now, hope you find this helpful in some way. Please drop questions/suggestions in the comments and let’s make it a discussion.
Also, refer this article to your friends and spread the learnings 😀
Acknowledgments: My product manager for helping with problem discovery, Shopsy design team, Shopsy content team, and Shopsy development team for building it.
Special thanks to Nandini and Samir for helping with the article.
