Increasing Intention in Design at Shoop
Hello
My name is Aleksandr Sudin. I’m a product designer. I was born and raised in Saint Petersburg. While studying Sound Engineering & Production at university, I started to use Mac OS and its well thought out interface inspired me to become an interface designer.
I started to work first as a UI, then UX, and finally Product designer in agencies and product companies. My experiences included working with:
- TV interface
- Website, mobile apps and CMS for audioguide ecosystem, as my first product company
- Mobile app for personal banking, where I started to conduct user interviews
- Automotive security system, where I was introduced to industrial design
I also have basic skills in data analysis and front-end.
This is my portfolio of projects from my current company. My more UI focused portfolio, you can find at Behance — http://be.net/sashaiknopochki
LinkedIn — https://www.linkedin.com/in/aleksandr-sudin-99896781/
Shoop
2 years ago I moved to Berlin and started to work at Shoop.de. Shoop is a cashback service, which is a type of affiliate marketing:
You open our website or app, see an offer, like “Buy something from Lieferando and get 4% back”, you click the button, we redirect you to Lieferando and track by cookies, you buy food from Lieferando, Lieferando tracks the transaction, then confirms it and pays us for the acquisition of a new customer and we share the biggest part of this profit with our user. Then the user can pay out this money to their bank account, PayPal, bitcoin or in a voucher.
When I joined the company, the website was already developed. My main products are mobile app and browser extension. I also support website and internals CRM for sales and support teams. I started my work with the app — from creation of the design system to bringing all the functionalities of the website to the app.
Instead of listing all of the features and my contributions, I want to highlight just a few recent ones.
Rating & recruitment of testers
Our partner didn’t confirm a lot of transactions and a lot of our users didn’t receive cashback and wrote us bad reviews at Trustpilot and our rating fell. Trustpilot is important in Germany, so I knew we needed to improve our score.
People use Shoop to get money but they didn’t get it. I assumed that the moment of highest user satisfaction is when users pay out money from their Shoop balance and it is almost in their hands.
I decided to show a small card over the payout success screen that suggests to the user to rate us and redirects to Trustpilot. A fullscreen card is quite intrusive, so I decided to introduce a new component to the design system for this and other cases in backlog.
I created the design, prototyped it and described all interactions for the developers.
Our Trustpilot rating has increased.
Outcome:
Later I worked together with the product owner and developers. We created a logic and started to use this positive moment and component to ask to rate our app on the app store, to invite friend, etc. Through these mini projects, I started to use existing marketing channels, newsletter and push notifications, for the recruitment of users for research and prototype testing.
Balance & Firebase analytics culture
We work only in the German market and even though I design all interfaces in German, I am not fluent yet so my product owner conducts the interviews. She found out that users open the app not to buy but just to check the balance.
I understood that I can improve it because users had to do an additional tap from the Home to the Profile tab in order to see the balance.
I added a Balance bar to the Home page.
While working on this, I found out that besides showing the money that is already on the account, there is technically a possibility to show the cashback that is confirmed by our partner and will also arrive in the account soon.
I created a lot of visualization variants and tested them with rapidusertesting.
Metric:
Shortly before this case, I started getting interested in data analytics since I don’t personally conduct interviews. I teamed up with my project manager, who used to study statistics at university, and together we decided to use Firebase for analytics since it was already integrated for developers performance purposes.
Analytics is harder than it seems
- I was supposed to start learning analytics much earlier.
- We messed up with the naming conventions at first, so had to struggle later by changing old actions and parameters.
Outcome:
I led the process of making events naming conventions and am still owning it.
Push Notifications
After I started to get into analytics, I found out that just 40% of our users receive push notifications. We have to ask permission from our users to show them.
While building the map of the existing and desired flow, I learned that when you show ready flow maps like this to the team, it only creates a lot of questions and nobody understands anything, so I started to run workshops and build things like this together with the team. As a result, the team now has a shared knowledge.
I came up with a hypothesis that users don’t agree to receive push notifications because we ask about it right after the first launch, like the majority of other apps, and the user doesn’t yet see the value. So I moved the appearance of this popup to later.
After a user returns from a partner’s site, we ask them “Seems like you have bought something and wait for your cashback, but how will you know that it’s here if you won’t allow us to send you push notifications.”
Acceptance rate has grown 15% within 2 months.
Support
I communicate a lot with the support team because they are on the frontline with our users.
Users can receive their cashback only after our partner confirms the transaction and when a user can’t send the purchase back, but some new users buy something and then immediately ask support “Where’s my money?”.
Solution:
I suggested to show a popup for new users that says what will happen next until they have a tracked transaction.
Metric:
Users don’t write these kind of tickets to support anymore.
2 Factor-authentication & Online non moderate research
We had to introduce 2FA to our users to save their vouchers.
I’ve started to use Maze and UItrial.
Browser extension
— notifies a user about available cashback, when the user comes to the site of our partner. Also users can find conditions and all other necessary information without leaving the site of our partner.
A recent cool feature is the Coupon Auto Applier. Besides cashback deals, we have voucher codes on the Shoop website. A user may copy and paste the code at the checkout of our partner, but this is time-consuming. We built this feature that searches and applies these codes automatically. Now with the extension, the user doesn’t need to do anything.
Analytics shows that our users love and use this feature. During the first 4 years since the introduction of this extension, WAU has grown from 0 to 10k weekly active users, but during the last 2 years that I’ve worked with it, it has grown to 26K weekly active users.
iOS Tracking
Recently Apple has introduced a more transparent Tracking policy. We were actually not supposed to be covered by it because we don’t sell users data to 3rd parties, but Apple thinks differently since we use 3rd parties WebViews and App2App tracking. We have to show a native tracking request in order to stay in the Apple app store.
Besides a toggle for each application that asks for tracking, there is a general toggle that allows for all apps to ask about tracking. I’ve found out that for some users the toggle is turned off, even though they are not from the group mentioned by Apple: older than 18, Apple ID is created more than 3 days ago, no profiles.
Problem:
Those people will never see a tracking request.
Solution:
When our user clicks out, goes to a partner site to make a transaction from our app, we show either a native request (on the right on the picture) if it is allowed in iOS settings, or a custom popup explaining that a user needs to change iOS settings to continue using the app and to get cashback.
