SLICKDEALS
APP REDESIGN
SCENARIO:
Slickdeals, the 25 year old home for the best deals on the internet every day, never pivoted to be mobile first and by 2024 was long overdue for a refresh. With a 25-45 million loyal monthly user base the product much deserved a modern design and user experience. We knew that in order to expand our user base and reach a target of 10 million daily active users we needed to build a much more exciting and modern product experience that was mobile app first and spoke to a much larger demographic and general population.
Our CEO and board of directors tasked me to create a vision for a completely redesigned app. We were seeking an experience that wouldn't just compete with other deal products but also top social platforms like Instagram and TikTok.
Our goal was to create the #1 entertainment deal shopping product in the country. Scroll on to read all about our journey and the steps we took to take on this massive product overhaul.
ROLES:
Design Sprint
Kick Off
I kicked off the massive product overhaul by holding an in person design sprint.
Over the course of 4 days we conducted an in depth design sprint covering every major area of the app. During the sprint we evaluated 3+ years of user feedback, feature requests, app store reviews, user interviews and data insights. After identifying top pain points for each area we came up with the solutions and features to address them. Lastly we conducted an effort vs impact exercise to prioritize what we were going to move forward with and build.
Discovery + Design Process
Once we scoped everything out and conducted our discovery work we started designing different feature experiences to test and find the best UX route to go with different features and areas of the product.
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There were lots of designs we wanted to test during our design discovery phase from feed structures and layouts to different feature designs. In addition to testing with core users I opened up company wide user testing and surveys to speed up gathering feedback. I wanted all employees at the company to have input and a chance to personally evaluate and weigh in their thoughts on the product we were building.
Feed Design Exploration
With an Instagram and TikTok product experience in mind we wanted to explore the possibility of beautiful and exciting large product imagery. The goal being to enhance the form of entertainment shopping and get users even more excited about the deals.
Alerts + Notifications
One of Slickdeals users favorite features is Deal Alerts. When there isn't a deal for what a user is looking for they set a deal alert and they are notified by their preferred method as soon as a deal becomes available or drops to the price in their target budget. When redesigning the UX we simplified creating an alert, enhanced the value and gave users more control over how they wanted to manage their alert preferences.
Old App vs. New App
Home
Browse
Search Results
Deal Pages
Profile
OUTCOME:
This was the most fun and biggest challenge I have had in my career. Bringing a 20+ year product into the present and finding that right balance between thousands of long time power users and the millions of general population of users was a huge undertaking that had to be done with extreme delicacy.
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We recently launched our Beta app for iOS and Android. So far we have seen massive improvements across all metrics and overall very happy users on both sides: long time power users and the general population of users. In addition, the design team received special shout outs and recognition from Apple around the new app design.
We are currently at a 4.8 rating and fingers crossed on our way to be featured as one of the apps of the month!
