Scentbird: redesign for retention
User retention is essential for a subscription service such as Scentbird.
My goal was to help people pick and queue more fragrances.
I interviewed 17 power users to find out how they picked fragrances online. I verified the qualitative findings with quantitative research (product data) and data from the customer support team.
I prioritized three areas of improvement: fragrance discovery, navigation, and recommender.
Every hypothesis was A/B tested.
A product card that helps to pick fragrances online
A bigger product card brought important information to the forefront, making it easier for users to select fragrances that matched their preferences. I added notes, a ratings and reviews ratio, and descriptions.
Users queued 50% more products from these cards.
Here, I've recreated them as React components for you to play with:
The product card had about a dozen variants for different use cases, from exploration pages and recommender results to search results and pages with filtered products.
Modular information architecture: improve onboarding and first-month retention
Right after registration, people experienced difficulty picking fragrances. Instead of creating explainer videos, pesky pop-ups, and tooltips, I introduced modules that addressed specific problems and helped users to accompish their tasks. I did some light restyling and introduced elevated cards to focus users on what’s more important and actionable.
Here are some examples:
Users quite often misspelled their addresses during registration. I decided to show them the delivery address so that they could change it right away. The test showed at least 1,600 users fixed their addresses after registration, saving us from shipment issues and time-consuming customer support.
New users struggled to pick a fragrance, so I illustrated for them how notes are important for a fragrance, and they started exploring based on what is popular. This section and the resulting pages quickly became one of the top-five sources for users adding fragrances to their queues.
With an expert curating each collection, it is easier to think of them as playlists or mixtapes. Each collection fits the central theme, serving as a convincing reason to try the suggested fragrances. This section quickly skyrocketed to be a top-3 source for customers adding products to their queues.
I am especially proud of this one. The UI was cluttered with upgrade promos, but they didn’t perform well. We removed 15+ banners from the UI and replaced all of them with this section, and it still performed better.
Cross-promotion was all over the place because of experiments, and I removed all other mentions and collected them in one place. All promos were combined on one page, and power users used them to get the best deals.
Each module was developed simultaneously for desktop and mobile. Some of the new modules made significant improvements on their own, e.g., users added more products to the queue from sections like Collections and Notes, and we saved lots of subscribers just by double-checking the shipping information. The new information structure made it easier for first-month subscribers to focus on fragrance and form their queue.