Senior Product Designer

Slant Guides

Goal.

The next level for Slant is taking all of the wonderful content created by our enthusiastic community and making it for everyone. The problem with jumping directly into Slant as a normal user is having to learn all of the rules for how everything works and the best way to read and internalize all of the information.

The goal of this new project was to create another layer to Slant just for the person looking for the best sous vide machine, or best 360 camera.

Process

First we really needed to understand this new type of user. We’d always had a fairly clear idea about our target user for the core of Slant, but now that we were targeting new people, we wanted to really draw out personas for these people to keep from getting lost in the weeds and stay focused.

Two of the four persona that helped guide our process.

After we’d finished with the personas, we re-looked at user interviews for insights that we’d abandoned or put off in the past, which didn’t align with our goal then. We found a lot of amazing information that helped guide our preliminary designs.

Early prototype for Slant Guides.

With the first designed done, we started our first round of interviews. We received decent initial feedback, but came to the same realization that we’d had in the past, that there is a massive difference in thinking when you are asked in a study about if you would buy vs actually sitting down and buying. We decided that based on this initial feedback, that the rest of our testing would be live on site via A/B testing and other methods.

The final version of the Slant Guides that went live.

Results.

Completing the Slant Guides was an exciting experiment in determining out the minimum that we needed to help others make the best decision when buying a new product. This project allowed us to focus in on our vision for the next year and helped us revise our roadmap for the following year.