Redesigning a Home Page
TL;DR
I led foundational research to understand why there was a lack of user engagement with Product Hunt’s website content. After conducting cognitive walkthroughs through 30 minute interviews, I identified commonly mentioned barriers that users faced when interacting with content (via upvotes or comments). Based on these barriers, I generated actionable recommendations that were used when developing the foundation for new homepage.
Product Hunt is a community website where startups can launch products and get feedback from early users of their products. Product creators can also use the platform to attract angel investors.
Product
Product Hunt Homepage
Product Hunt was in the process of planning a home page redesign so that it was tailored to users’ liking. The team wanted to ensure that the new home page would address any pain points that the original site design had. Activity logs indicated that there was a lack of user engagement with website content. There were two ways that users (who weren’t posting products) could interact with content: by upvoting products or commenting on product pages.
Background
Screenshot of where users can upvote
Screenshot of where users can comment
While we knew that there was a lack of user engagement, we didn’t know why. The goal of my research was to identify barriers that were preventing users from engaging with website content. My specific research questions were:
What are the pain points in the existing Product Hunt user flow?
What are barriers that are preventing users from interacting with website content?
Objectives
Method: Because there was no existing research on Product Hunt’s user flow (I was the first UXR), I decided to conduct exploratory research using the cognitive walkthrough method. I recruited 9 users with Product Hunt accounts, because this was a qualitative study where we were looking for the why behind the numbers we were seeing. Each session was a 30 minute interview, during which I observed the organic flow of users. When the user would mention that they usually don’t comment or upvote anything, I would ask follow-up questions to probe for engagement barriers.
Recruitment: To recruit participants, I generated a list of e-mails for users that: Logged in at least once during the previous two weeks AND never upvoted or commented on a product page. I reached out to participants via e-mail and had them sign up for an interview slot.
Study Design
🚨Roadblock🚨
As the first UX Researcher at Product Hunt, I had to establish best practices for conducting research. While I love tackling a challenge, I did run into a few barriers while recruiting participants, due to lack of existing research protocol:
High-level stakeholders were reluctant to set aside money so that participants could be compensated for their time. I got to apply my human motivation knowledge here to explain why participants need an incentive to participate in research. After negotiating with stakeholders, I was able to secure funding and compensate participants
I initially had issues recruiting participants with the users I pulled from SQL using the criteria that the user had to have a Product Hunt account and has never interacted with content. After some trial and error with recruitment response rates, I eventually figured out that adding a filter for users that logged in at least once in the past two weeks made recruitment much more successful.
The participants were located all over the world, which made compensation difficult. Different countries have different laws with how you can send money, so I had to do research into each participant’s country to figure out how I could compensate them (via PayPal, Visa Giftcard, etc). After I finished this study, I found a service that future researchers could use to compensate participants, regardless of the country they live in.
I conducted a thematic analysis with interview transcripts to identify specific barriers that participants mentioned that prevented them from engaging with product pages.
Analysis
The most commonly mentioned reasons for lack of engagement were:
Insights
I translated these findings into actionable recommendations and presented them to stakeholders. The following recommendations were used when developing the redesigned homepage:
Strained Cognitive Load: Break up the product listing into categories or personalize product listings on homepage to user’s interests
Habit: Provide incentive for upvoting or commenting on products, such as points to redeem for a prize
Lack of Confidence: Emphasize value that user feedback has on product development, maybe by including examples of past products that were shaped by feedback from Product Hunt users