Ratings & Rankings

Project: Ratings & Rankings

Type: New feature

Project charter

Silver Studio is Genies’ digital fashion app. At the time of this redesign, users were able to design fashion items, create outfits, and share these in a feed with other users where they could get likes.

This project was meant to tackle two problems: low interaction rates on posts (# of likes) and a hypothesized related steep dropoff in the posting rate for users (posts per user).

Despite having a robust platform for creation in Silver Studio, there was no clear purpose for users to create outfits. We wanted to make it easier to answer the question “Why create an outfit in Silver Studio?”

Solution

How might we improve our engagement mechanism to increase posts per user and interactions per post?

Our first hypothesis was that with our small user base, the limited number of likes users were getting didn’t feel like sufficient recognition for the effort that it took users to create and post an outfit.

My research also revealed that Gen Z feels that likes are an outdated concept. This meant our engagement mechanism was fundamentally not motivating to our desired user base.

We needed a new engagement mechanism that

a) resonated with and felt current to Gen Z

b) still felt like sufficient incentive with a limited number of interactions per post

After testing a number of rapidly evolving prototypes, I found users responded best with being rated based off trending categories (Grunge, Y2K, etc). This concept also leant itself to leaderboards for each category, which further gamified the experience. Users felt more motivated by being rated 3 times and possible making it to a leaderboard as opposed to getting 3 likes.

Outcomes

Successfully launched this feature on time as the only designer with a team of 35 engineers

• 160% increase in post interactions per user

• 28% increase in posts per user

• 71% increase in weekly active users