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Recommendations
Project 3: Recommendations on the show planner
The recommendations are one of the most used features at the shows, it helps driving exposure to both Exhibitors and visitors based on behavior and data, providing a more complete experience. However, recommendations alone are not enough as the user needs to be able to mark somehow who is he/she interested in and would like to connect with later on.
This project focuses on creating the Matchmaking component more interactive by enabling the user to 'like' or unlike' each card recommended to the user. When a recommendation is liked it gets saved on the show planner to help the user manage a list of potential visits when during the show. the latter feature is the 6th most used component of the site and improving its functionality can increase customer retention as it builds trust among both users Exhibitors and visitors
User: Visitor
Requirement 1: Enable interaction like / unlike
Requirement 2: Provide other interactive features to improve the event planning experience and increase activity through the matchmaking components, user retention, and conversion.
The process
Discovery
Resource 1: Reeds is an international company, and wants to ensure we define an experience that can be implemented across all countries I needed to ensure the business units were aligned. this allowed me to understand What / Why and How they operate their mindset and how things operate for each country.
Resource 2: The 'Visitor's journey', done by the company a few years back, I wanted to map out what feature would be crucial and in which stage of the journey.
Resource 3: A research is done on the 7 behaviors, this gave me an understanding of the types of personalities we have at the shows and KPIs indicators
Resource 4: A training on gamification training was done to understand what motivates these behaviors to interact with our component and service in a given stage of the event's journey.
Challenges
- Poor guidance and communication between teams regarding research done years back or knowledge shared
- Lack of clarity on the requirements
- Information was given close to the deadline
- Lots of politics regarding the site space allocated to the teams
- Realized that we have a huge dependency on testing/research agencies
- The user's panel was small therefore the demographics didn't cover enough to give us a confirmation of our assumptions
- Data protection
- Technology constraints
- BUs promotion and adoption of features
Opportunities
- Established and an internal guerrilla testing process in place but did not get happen due to the current situation
- The research team experimented new ways of testing our work
- Lots of insides from the users through the testing session
- Lead to customization journeys
Learnings
After 2 months of discussions, presentations, and feedback loops. During one of my presentions to other POs and team, I learned that one of my PO knew about research done by an external agency for the same task but most likely did not remember as I was asked to do the same work again.
The positive of this is that all the findings I learned, and the solution I had in mind were already proposed on the research done by an external agency a year back. I clarify my deck was not as detailed and as pretty as the agency, but I was happy I was aligned to a similar outcome.
Mapping user journeys
Based on my research, I listed the phases of the users' journey and the activities that would motivate and help the user achieve their objective effortless as shown in the image below.
Mapping actions and stages
Based on my research, I listed the phases of the users' journey and the activities that would motivate and help the user achieve their objective effortless as shown in the image below.
Ideation
In order to share the bigger picture and help us all shape the solution, I have run a couple of workshops with both Business units (BUs) and the team. this was great as it helped us align and focus towards one direction.
Design Decisions
Position
Based on the BUs strategy and the page there will be areas in which recommendations could be the position differently example:
Home page: the business has requested this component to be at bottom of the page but above the footer, as there could be more relevant information the user needs to know about and to reduce mental distraction.
however, I suggest that depending on the type of show like Participant to participant (P2P) this component should be at the fold of the page if there is not a hero component. the Why? this is to increase the chances for the participants to find and interact with the recommended profiles and eventually get to connect.
Participant Directory page:
This page can be rather long unless you have the filter on or do some of the search, again having at the fold will increase the chances for participants to be aware of the recommendations, increase activity and provide the help the users meet others based on their behavior or preferences.
Show planner: I don't think there is a need to add the recommendations on this component as this has one purpose and its to help the user plan for the show, the recommendations will add confusion and distraction to the user.
Interactions
Motivations enable the users to achieve their final goals, such as meeting a new prospect to make new business, build a list of contacts, we identified the following interactions that should provide the user with the tools to achieve that.
Like: This is an existing feature that enables users to add a favorite to a list, in this scenario the Show planner is used to hold that list and to help users visitors to organize and plan the visit to the show.
Connect: the user should be able to connect with a prospect via email, LinkedIn, direct message, or book a slot to meet at the show.
Location at the show: the user should be able to find the location where an exhibitor has agreed to meet at the show, this functionality already exist but not on the recommendations card
Share and Views: If visitors can access the views list or share a recommendation we could increase the number of connections for both Exhibitors and visitors.
If visitors can access the views list of a recommendation we could increase visitor behavior and provide more recommendations.
However, the above hypothesis needs to be tested, to confirm our prediction for implementation or not.
Testing
To test the above solution the Research team has provided a group of 10 participants, which were invited to a face to face interview. I also had the chance to take place in order to get a sense of the qualitative side of the test and to talk to the participants.
Great feedback was collected lots of ideas and ways to interact with the real users to clarify their needs. it helped me understand their mental models and personalities. However, I believe more than 10 people could have been better to cover more demographics and different users' types of Visitors and exhibitors.
The results confirmed the solutions suggested were aligned with the user's needs, the ability to place like and create a list of potential contacts was a great idea, furthermore being able to get in contact directly between Exhibitor and visitor would provide a more complete experience and help the users achieve their goal.
The share and view functionalities needed further experimentation as we need a bigger group.
Together with the PO, BA we were to prioritize what feature is to be developed first and to further understand the dependencies and involvements of other teams.
Conclusion
Sadly this project is on hold due to the lockdown, for now, the focus in on enhancing the recommendations' user retention journeys at registration for both Exhibitors and Visitors.
Now new research is been happening to understand the new needs of our users.
I still believe we need to help enable the user to connect at any type of show, there is a new opportunity to for shows to have global access digitally and many people would benefit from the service as they can create business and exposure globally.
SPlanner - conclusion
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