New customer acquisition growth was one of the core drivers for Getty Images in 2020. As a function of growing those users, the e-commerce team had done a re-design of the plans and pricing page. Trying to reduce the cognitive load the design team had broken the page into two sections, subscriptions and credit packs. The new credit pack selector design was a carousel show here.
Now fast forward to 2021, and one of the core drivers is Deliver E-Commerce and Customer Service Improvements. Specifically, E-Commerce and marketing tests and optimizations to drive new customers and lifetime customer value. My project manager and I decided to evaluate the current product mix. Amongst other insights, we found an opportunity in the number of credit packs being sold.
Digging in we found feedback in our Voice of the Customer chat data that suggested people were having issues purchasing our credit packs. We then went to find more data from the user research team and conversations with the Customer Service team. There was friction for our customers who wanted to purchase smaller credit packs. The design had chunked the information nicely but the affordance of the controls wasn’t enough and our users didn’t know how to navigate the carousel. Whatever we defaulted to, users seemed to only see those five options and purchase from that smaller list.
The current presentation was trying to solve a problem we hear often from our users. The problem is that they have cognitive overload, with the amount of information shown, so the team used a carousel to only show five options at a time. The problem was the controls of the tiles were not immediately visible so users would not use them and only think there were five options for them. As we presented alternatives we needed to keep in mind the cognitive overload problem we had originally solved for.
Our hypothesis was that in the past users felt overwhelmed because the options were not scannable or comparable. Breaking the information into tiles (current implementation) gave the user less to focus on but did not solve the comparability. It was hard to find the information they needed and keep that information in their minds as they compared between credit pack options.
After many ideation sessions, we were ready to test a few different options for users. Since the User Research team was overloaded with requests, I partnered with a researcher to run an unmoderated study of four options. Here are the four options we presented:
As a result of the study, we heard a similar sentiment, users preferred option D because of the nature of the list. The list is very valuable for people to scan and see differences in the rows of data. The users also liked the fact that we had grouped the columns of data into two groups for them to be able to quickly dive into a specific sub-group.
One factor that we changed from the study was the “with this pack you get” section was not visible on the page above the fold, the users wanted to see this closer to the packs.
Results of the series of tests were positive in our key metric customer lifetime value. Revenue across all regions and paths beside one was up and hovers around a 20% increase.
I can’t reveal exact numbers but we’ve seen this a huge success within the customer acquisition track.
