Photo Gallery Sponsorship

On mobile web, users spend a lot of time viewing photo gallery pages but video views are what drive revenue. Stakeholders decided to add a video in each gallery page. Shortly after the change, engagement had dropped -99%.

Business goal: Optimize and find advertising and sponsorship opportunities without interrupting the experience.

Responsible for: UX, UI, Prototyping, Visual Design • Screener Questionnaire • User Testing

Challenges: Getting stakeholders to agree we needed to remove the videos.

CURRENT GALLERY HYPOTHESIS

User Expectations: On load, a photo gallery.

High Interaction Costs: A hidden gallery, scrolling through lengthy copy and an unexpected video with a 30sec preroll ad.

Cost/Benefit Trade-Off: Getting to the gallery has a high interaction cost for a low perceived benefit causing abandonment.

USER TESTING CURRENT DESIGN

Testing with 5 people let us find almost as many usability problems as we’d find using many more test participants.

The user pain points were similar across the board, proving my hypothesis was on the right track.

USER TESTING A PROTOTYPE

Horizontal Concept: No wire-framing was done because of time constraints to launch before the Olympics and because most article elements are already set.

We tested 5 users for quick feedback to get motivated to go back to the drawing board and redesign to eliminate the usability problems.

We highlighted some key findings for stakeholders and what we wanted to iterate on.

Challenges

Due to Invision’s limitations, we weren’t able to include the swipe left/right functionality early on.

More Challenges

Testing some recirculation ideas to get users to stay on the site and explore more.

Testing a concept of having a page featuring just galleries. Unfortunately during testing, none of the users got that far to see it. More iterating to be done.

Ad Challenges

Convincing stakeholders that traditional ads don’t work as well as they use to and to be open to more native ideas.

TO BE CONTINUED

We hope to continue to iterate and meet the needs of users and not of the HiPPOs.