How I Cut Scope and Increased Return Payer Attendance

Tophatter does well on new user conversion and engagement but struggles with retention. I designed “Challenge of the Week” to encourage return attendance by converting a shopper’s investment of time to monetary value.

In the ideation phase, our loyalty feature quickly got convoluted, with discussions of a new point currency and different tiers. With a more in-depth loyalty program with multiple levels, there were concerns over how we would remove the feature without creating a bad user experience. I cut the scope and challenged the team to build a simple solution with the goal to get a demand signal.

From our MVP, we found “Challenge of the Week” had positive results for return Tophatter customers, increasing return payer attendance by 10.8% and payer conversion by 9.7%.

ABOUT TOPHATTER

Tophatter is a mobile discovery shopping marketplace that connects buyers and sellers from around the world in real-time 90-second auctions for jewelry, electronics, beauty, and household items. Most of Tophatter’s auctions start at $1 and are designed to generate excitement and competition among shoppers. Tophatter has roughly 20 million shoppers and sells 100,000 items a day. 

WIREFRAMES

With “Challenge of the Week,” I wanted to build a fun, alive design that provides variety from the typical auction slots.

I communicated progress and encouraged a sense of achievement both through a thoughtful notification system and a progress bar. I included toasts to indicate where the shopper was in the quest and congratulatory modals for when a quest had been completed. I also made the progress bar increase after each action instead of after each quest to show recognition along the way.

HI-FIDELITY DESIGNS

I worked with our visual designer, Sheng Chu, to arrive at the final specs:

USABILITY TESTING

I wrote usability questions to determine what extent “Challenge of The Week” incentivizes shoppers to return to Tophatter and how interested they are in more challenges and levels. I also dove into why new shoppers weren’t as interested in “Challenge of the Week.”

I watched 5 new and 5 return shoppers interact with the “Challenge of the Week” feature.

Complementary to the metrics, I found positive sentiment towards the feature from our return shoppers:

What I found interesting is that all 5 new testers were put-off by having to make a purchase in the challenge and wanted something more lightweight to get their feet wet.

PERFORMANCE

“Challenge of the Week” had a positive lift for return shoppers:

FUTURE ITERATIONS

While “Challenge of the Week” had a strong initial positive boost, the hypothesis is that the challenge would get stagnant over time and we’ll need more levels to keep up engagement. Now that we have a clear demand signal, we can invest in building more achievement tiers to keep shoppers coming back.

Tophatter also has the opportunity to adapt “Challenge of the Week” for new users to include lightweight interactions that do not require making a purchase.

TAKEAWAYS

WHAT I DID WELL

I cut scope and simplified to one clear goal to get a demand signal on whether “Challenge of the Week” improves return attendance. Only after we got positive metrics, did I let us explore future iterations and think about multiple levels and tiers.

I also did usability testing to understand why there was friction with new users and discovered that making a purchase was the main pain point. That insight fueled me to think about how we could adapt “Challenge of the Week” to be value-added for new shoppers.

HOW I WOULD IMPROVE

If I were to build “Challenge of the Week” again, I would have pushed early on for potential engineering concerns and constraints, ideally in the wireframe phase. We used a third-party service for the notification toasts that ended up being limited and difficult for our engineers. I had to adjust my designs to their constraints, which required unnecessary back-and-forth. Hashing out these concerns earlier in the process would have saved both me and the engineers’ time and headache.