“Your Wedding Team”
The goal of this project was to create an app experience that would make it easier for engaged couples to keep track of their wedding vendors and encourage them to contact and book more of their vendors using The Knot’s marketplace. The results were increased engagement and significant impact on our most critical key metric.
User Problems
Problem A — As an engaged couple we need to easily find the vendors that are best for us, but we often don’t know what we need and even where to start.
Problem B — I’m trying to keep track of so many wedding details, but it’s difficult for me to manage my saved, contacted and booked vendors.
Business Problem
The majority of our quality leads are in the Reception Venue category. However, to ensure the overall health of our marketplace ecosystem we need leads in as many “non-venue” vendor categories as possible.
Hypothesis
We Believe that focussing the user on building a team will: 1) encourage couples to engage more often with the vendors tab and 2) instill a mindset more focussed on completing a “vendor team”, resulting in contacting vendors across more categories.
Success Metrics
We will know this to be true when there is an increase in non-venue quality leads and user engagement/retention.
Added Bonus
Improving the existing Booked and Saved vendor experiences will make the vendor experience better overall and should positively impact overall saving and therefore overall leads.
Research & Exploration
I worked with another designer to conduct a series of user interviews focussing on the tools couples use to keep track of wedding planning details. We chose to interview 5 couples who were engaged and planning their wedding and 5 recent newlyweds who could reflect back on what had worked and what had been difficult for them.
Our biggest takeaways were that couples used a surprisingly wide variety of tools to plan their weddings and that couples often didn’t know what they needed or where to find it and relied on recommendations from friends, other vendors or websites like The Knot.
With these learnings my team did a design sprint to explore ideas for how we might relieve some of the pain points associated with vendor management.
IA & UX
I continued to flesh out the ideas from our design sprint focussing on the concept of building a team. After reviewing these sketches with some other designers and my product manager, I developed wireframes and flow maps of what we thought would be the most impactful directions.
Once we had a couple of options, we used the wireframes to create low fidelity prototypes with inVision and ran unmoderated user tests on a sample set of engaged couples. The results from the user tests gave us a strong signal for narrowing down a final IA direction.
UI & Engineering Handoff
I took the model that tested most successfully and mocked up UI drawing from our TK App Design System which I helped develop. Then my product manager and I determined what to prioritize for an MVP collaboratively with our engineers.
As soon as the MVP was stable and launched to a test group in production, I ran another series of unmoderated user tests on the live app. We learned that users expected some of the gesture based interactions we had descoped from the MVP and users were also hitting dead ends on detail pages. We used these test results to prioritize which features to add back in, as well as some iterative improvements.
Impact
This feature replaced an older booked vendors tool that was confusing and difficult to use. In the first month after release, engagement with this feature increased 88%. We also moved to other key metrics (non-venue storefront views and non-venue quality leads by 19% and 31% respectively.
The modular foundation we established for this feature also enabled other teams like Checklist and Inspiration to easily add relevant modules to Your Vendors, making movement and exposure to features more organic and less siloed.
