Chatbooks
Holiday Shop Redesign Case Study
Platforms: iOS, Android
Team/Role: UX Designer — Acquisition team
Website: chatbooks.com or download the app from apps.apple.com
TL;DR
Over the past two years at Chatbooks I’ve designed new features for the flagship app such as a guest checkout experience, collaborative chat functionality, and social sharing. I’ve strengthened the Chatbooks “Breakfast” Design System through designing new components, refining old ones, and completely altering the way we use color in the Chatbooks app. I’ve up-leveled the design team through the creation of workflow management, presentation, and communication tooling.
While all those contributions have enhanced the Chatbooks app for its customers and improved business metrics, the project of focus for this case study will be the 2021 Holiday Shop redesign that had a 22.3% higher conversion rate than the previous holiday season.
Chatbooks Holiday Shop
Problems
Part of operating an e-commerce store is the constant effort to improve conversion rates. For Chatbooks, the most important time to have high conversion rates is the Christmas holiday season where we do almost 30% of our yearly sales. In order to maximize our conversion rate during the peak season, we have to reassess changing customer intent and redesign the shop page of the Chatbooks app to reflect that intent.
This was my main focus during Q4 of 2021 as the UX designer on the Acquisition team at Chatbooks. In this case study, I say “we” mostly in reference to myself and my Product Manager, but also use it to describe times when the teams Product Marketing Manager, User Researcher, and Data Analyst were involved. The biggest questions we wanted to answer with this new Shop page design were:
- How can we organize our products in a way that will match our customers intent?
- How can we account for marketing messaging screen real estate during the holiday season without hurting customers ability to find the product they’re interested in?
- How can we balance the Initial Customer Transaction (ICT) mix for cheaper subscription products VS higher value Classic Photo Book purchases in a way that will achieve immediate revenue goals, but also support the overall growth of the organization?
Ideation
Throughout the majority of the year, selling Monthbook subscriptions is the focus of the Acquisition team at Chatbooks. There are numerous benefits to having customers purchase a Monthbook subscription, the greatest being a higher customer Lifetime Value (LTV). That being said, during the Christmas holiday, customers intent moves from wanting a way to print their everyday memories to wanting to print larger, gift-worthy photo books. It becomes a huge opportunity to sell our more expensive Classic Photo Books, which have a much higher Initial Order Value (IOV).
Therefore, for the Holiday season, it becomes more important to prioritize high IOV that matches customer intent rather than high LTV that goes against majority customer intent.
We ordered our products by priority in a way that balanced customer intent with how much each product would positively impact business metrics. This gave us a good starting point for how to organize the products on the Shop page in a way that allowed customers to find the products they have intent to find, while also encouraging users to explore our higher LTV products.
Iterations
With the product priority determined, I began designing various iterations of the Shop page. A core foundation of the design was flexibility. During the Holiday season, we needed the ability to rapidly alter product order, sizing, and imaging so the iterations I began experimenting with were all designed to be built in a way that could facilitate that flexibility.
As I designed, two options stood out as the most interesting.
Option 1 emphasized a philosophy of making the highest priority products large. The sacrifice here is that by making the products larger, we allow for fewer of them on the screen at a time. This is most notable in what I deemed the “Top Shop” where the highest priority product exists as a full size product tile which takes up nearly the entire screen. Marketing tiles and other high priority products were listed beneath in wide tiles; lower priority products in smaller, square tiles.
Option 2 focused more on findability by making only the very highest intent products wide and keeping all others small, only differentiating priority by order listed.
Both options included a new “Beyond Easy Gift Guide”, the brain-child of my amazing product marketing manager.
User feedback and testing
In order to determine which option to build, we conducted user feedback sessions to get a better feel for which design might be more usable to cater better to users preferences.
7/10 users are better able to navigate and understand V1 of the Holiday Shop Screen. This is because the larger pictures/font categories are easier for the user to read, and the layout is less overwhelming than the cluster of products presented in V2. 8/10 users weren’t aware Chatbooks sold Holiday Cards prior to the study, because they go in with specific intentions and don’t spend time browsing in the app. Users tend to note Classic Photo Books as the standout product in V1 versus Monthbooks as the standout in V2. 4/10 users like the gifting categories (i.e. ‘For Grandparents’), and would like to see them presented higher up on the screen for easier access.
(Holiday Shop Screen User Feedback study)
The user feedback results indicated very clearly that Option 1 better fit our desired goal of helping users view Classic Photo Books as the standout product. I updated the design with Holiday imagery and made some slight tweaks based on marketing needs.
We moved this refined design into production, but before rolling out the new Holiday shop to all users, we conducted an A/B test with a segment to test the new designs effectiveness in production. The primary metric we decided to track as evidence of our success was Classic Photo Book purchase rate. Additional metrics that were important to monitor were overall purchase rates and Monthbook subscription rates.
Classic Photo Book Purchase Rate: 12.5% higher for the test group.
Overall Purchase Rate: No statistical difference.
Monthbook Subscription Rate: No statistical difference.
Classic Photo Book Milestone Funnel: The test group performed better than or equal to the control group starting at the milestone of the user viewing the PDP.
(2021 Holiday Shop Screen A/B Test)
The A/B test concluded that the new Holiday shop screen allowed for a 12.5% higher purchase rate for Classic Photo Books and had no statistical difference in Monthbook subscription rate. So the new Shop increased the amount of people purchasing Classic Photo Books without any negative impact on subscription rate or overall purchase rate.
Results
The new Holiday Shop was implemented and preformed better than we had hoped. The Holiday Shop had 22.3% higher conversion rate than the previous holiday season. We not only wanted high conversion rates, but also, to maintain a healthy ICT mix with a high number of customers purchasing Classic Photo Books over Monthbook subscriptions. The ICT mix leading into the Holiday season averaged around 50% of purchasing customers buying Classic Photo Books and around 50% of purchasing customers buying Monthbooks. During the Holidays, that ICT mix changed to around 80% for Classic Photo Books and 10% Monthbooks.
Conclusion
Based on the data, it’s clear the 2021 Holiday Shop was a huge success. The design changes I made worked in tandem with the swing in customer intent to shift our ICT mix to having a higher number of users purchasing Classic Photo Books. Alongside achieving that goal, the 2021 Holiday Shop had 22.3% higher conversion rate than the previous holiday season.
What I learned
Throughout this experience, it was reinforced to me how valuable it is to work as a team to achieve great results. It was critical to work closely with my product manager to hash out business needs and identify exactly what products would provide us the metrics we needed to end the year successfully for our team. Our user researcher and data analysist provided precise insights that influenced which options we used and validated our hypotheses. My product marketing manager was an absolute genius in coming up with ideas for product imagery, order, copy, and for including an amazing Gift Guide as part of the Shop.
Next Steps
Though it was an extremely successful Holiday season for the Acquisition team at Chatbooks, Q1 holds new challenges as we revert back to the off-season priorities. Investigating customer support ticket trends and happiness tracking surveys from before the holidays, a common theme during the low-intent months of the year is difficulty finding the right product.
Users report that it is not always obvious how to find new products, figure out which product they should be ordering, or how to get to current drafts.
(User Happiness Tracking, November 2021)
For the next iteration in Q1, I’ve already begun designing and getting user feedback on a Shop screen with improved search and filtering capabilities.
One of my favorite pastimes is connecting with other humans! Please reach out and connect with me via LinkedIn or email.
Check out more of my work and don’t hesitate to provide feedback.
Thanks,
— Jackson
