Proving value early to new users to drive acquisition

MY ROLE

Strategy
User Research
Visual Design
UX 

PLATFORMS

Web

Problem

Stride, a Google Area 120 product, is a small business community centered around asking and answering questions about starting and running a small business. The team initially pursued a high-touch user acquisition strategy by meeting and developing one-on-one relationships with business owners and inviting them to join Stride. It was time to expand our reach and leverage organic traffic to Stride's landing page. The first iteration of the landing page provided very little insight into what the community was like leading visitors to say:

PEOPLE PROBLEM

"I can't tell if this community would be beneficial to me before sign up."

BUSINESS PROBLEM

“We need to boost organic traffic to successfully expand outside of Portland.”

Users

Stride was piloted with a small user base in Portland, Oregon. The team pursued a high-touch user acquisition strategy, developing one-on-one relationships with users. This allowed me to meet business owners in-person to conduct user interviews to learn more about their needs in a community.

Through research, we found that user behavior fell into 3 categories:

• Learners were asking the questions and creating the content on Stride. Often times, they were new to owning a small business or new to an industry and looking for guidance and timely, helpful answers to their questions.
• Helpers were typically veterans of an industry who were answering questions on Stride. Although they had altruistic motivations, they engaged with Stride on a weekly basis, hunting for relevant questions to answer.
• Browsers were users who were on Stride to passively absorb information. These folks were interested in starting a business and were doing some research. They wanted low-friction involvement and had little engagement on the platform.

"Content is king"

We partnered with Google to identify strategies to improve our organic traffic through SEO. Through these learnings, we quickly formed the hypothesis that by focusing on the richness of content and content discovery on Stride, we could increase organic traffic and prove value early to new users.

RICHER CONTENT

We introduced topic tags to all content and grouped similar questions by topic. This allowed for easier discoverability of content for both new potential members and SEO bots.

AVAILABLE TO NON-MEMBERS

Making this rich member experience available to non-members on the landing page allowed them to get a better insight into the community.

Now when non-members visited the Stride landing page and clicked on the example questions, they were lead to related questions at the bottom of the question detail page. This enabled potential new users to vet Stride before joining. They also had access to the new topic page feature where they could find even more relevant content to their specific industry.

Validating through user research

In order to validate the new design and to determine the order of the sections in the landing page, I ran the designs through user research.

EXECUTIVE DECISION OF NEW DESIGN

Users were mixed on the new design, which gave the team confidence to move forward with the new design since it reflected the brand best.

A/B TESTING STRATEGY

Most users preferred the value prop section with the content section as a close second. Our plan was to A/B test these sections in swapped positions.

Results

The team was unfortunately dissolved due to the pandemic. Even though the landing page did not ship, some helpful metrics we would have considered include:

• SERP ranking improvement
• Increase in impressions
• Sign up conversions, specifically from topic pages and question detail pages where we added more content