I’m now almost three weeks into a new role with the app team and today took part in my first app hackathon.
At first I was slightly alarmed that we were all going to be taking a day out of delivery with an important deadline on the horizon, but I thoroughly enjoyed the day and found it surprisingly valuable to step back mid-Sprint and think about what the future holds beyond July.
I joined a group looking at homescreen personalisation, which I was particularly keen on as I’d already done some thinking around this in preparation for the interview and was pleased to see the team were thinking about opportunities in this area themselves.
Our app as it stands is like a scaled down version of the website. The homescreen lists all the products we offer, which in turn direct users through category screens and article screens, through the creation journey and onto the checkout. It’s functional and in many ways easier to manoeuvre than the website, but there’s a missed opportunity there for our return customers.
The biggest pain point we identified early on was that every customer has the same experience of the homescreen. Whether it’s their first time opening the app or they’ve been an active customer for many years, they each need to navigate through a catalogue-style layout to find and create a product.
As an alternative to this, we set about imagining a more personalised model where customer behaviour and preferences are utilised to craft an individual experience.
Hypothesis: If we can replace uncertainty with inspiration we will achieve higher conversion rates and increased order value per customer.
Once we had our goal of increased personalisation defined, we were able to brainstorm ideas around how this might play out for customers on the homescreen, map dependencies and group each idea into effort versus impact buckets. This step enabled us to define a now, next and future roadmap with the quick wins prioritised upfront and the bolder features identified for later in the year.
Happily, all the features in the ‘now’ column could be coded up into an on-the-day POC for sharing immediately with the wider domain and soon with customers in our first round of user testing.
Altogether I had a great day and I’m glad to have joined the team at such an interesting point in their journey!
Digital Becca 