In alcohol, preferences are highly personal and increasingly savvy shoppers are side-eyeing unsolicited recommendations if not paired with trustworthy endorsements. When spending their hard-earned coin for a tried and true libation, sans “tried”, the #1 factor in purchase decisions for casual night-cappers was a trusted source’s co-sign, “Friendorsements”, if you will.
Type:
Product Design, UX Strategy
Role:
Lead Product Designer
Timeline:
6 weeks
Team
UX, Growth, Eng, Data Analytics
It it even possible to replicate the social aspects of spirit discovery?
CHALLENGE
In 2019, delivery to your door with just a few taps was ubiquitous for all manners of consumables.
However, as the patterns for browsing, making selections, and awaiting your goods were established, then cemented - many intangibles of IRL browsing, and particularly, discovery were lost. Shopping your favorite beer, wine, and spirits in the Saucey app was convenient but no different. Already price sensitive, this left consumers to the drab business of only buying what they know to avoid the risk of costly disappointment, and creating an environment of competing priorities between Ops and Marketing Teams hoping to boost AOV, and Retail partners who were seeing little movement outside of their most mainstream SKUs.
OUR 10,000 ft GOALS
To bolster the way customer confidence and organic discovery while expanding cart value and driving adoption of a wider variety of products off the shelves, I took aim at a few things:
Shifting the in-app experience from the uncertainty of experimenting to the confidence of trusted source recommendations.
Increase AOV as customers by enticing customers to put additional items into their carts.
Expand engagement with Saucey’s robust menu creating brand equity with retailers, and marketing opportunities with vendors.
Build on existing recommendations and reviews patterns recently established to expedite experimentation and not cause mutiny among my eng partners.
Digging Into The Data
To start things off, I paired up with Aadi to look at conversion funnels, core-flow events, and AOV to see what the numbers had to say about it all.
Chatting Internally Key Stakeholders
Two things stood out in these chats: 1) Almost all included some mention of overcoming stubborn brand loyalty and the loss of IRL discovery. 2) Social proof was an agreed upon stepping stone across function. We had seen the addition of real reviews in SEO pages drive account sign-up and 1st order conversion.
Surveying users
Design your site on a familiar free-form canvas. Visually set up your breakpoints to make it responsive.
Taking Inventory
Visually structure your pages and link to them easily.
Eva Elle
@evaelle
Thank you for building such an empowering tool, especially for designers! The site went from Figma to Framer in less than a week!
Guy Mccoy
@mccoy
Playing around with @framer while building a landing page for a side project. I’m terrible at animations, but they make it so easy!
Kayla Ray
@kayray
I’ve built pretty handy sites powered by Craft or WordPress in the past, but seeing @framer tackle CMS stuff so effortlessly is mind-boggling
This is a process story
Very early on I recognized Proper, a company who at the time focused on cannabis reviews and were a good friends of our founder, did plain language and human-centered use cases pretty well. I knew there was much we could learn and much we could share. With our newly mapped product data and Proper's vast database of cannabis reviews – how cool would it be to collaborate on getting the right products into the hands of people looking for them? I designed strain cards to live in product detail pages as a way to surface effects data with well-placed and friendly education powered by Proper.
Let's see it all in the wild…
Landing page, Search modal, Navigation takeover menu, Category page, and Filters all featuring contextual info, language people actually use, and product clarity in key shopping stages.
Survey says…
Number in the trailing months took a steady climb upward, while calls about product mismatch and dissatisfaction to Customer Support line meant to field account and delivery questions saw a decline.
