Product and User Experience Design
Product and User Experience Design
Lift & Co. started as a review platform for medicinal cannabis users that filled the gap between patients and producers.
Users would visit our site to learn about what strains helped others with similar ailments, and left reviews on their own purchase experiences. Each review written was rewarded with a discount on their next medicinal cannabis purchase.
On October 17, 2018 legalization of cannabis was declared in Canada and rendered the entire business model non-compliant.
Our product no longer served its existing user base and there was an entire new market segment to seize, but we didn’t know anything about them.
In turn, we ended up losing users, reviews, and revenue almost overnight and needed to act quickly.
Our success criteria was to increase sign ups and reviews.
Part of my role and responsibilities was to understand our redefined personas and their motivations in order to tailor our offering towards identified gaps and opportunities.
This meant working closely with product marketing using tools like Google Analytics and Fullstory to track demographics, entry points, user flows, and search terms used to find us.
Through capturing this data I was able to flesh out two distinct personas and their journeys within our product.
Desperate Dave
Desperate Dave makes up 17% of our user base. He is 18-24, male and familiar with cannabis. His motivation for leaving reviews are discounts and free stuff.
He has most likely ended up on Lift.co by searching for a specific strain and converted once learning about the rewards program.
Desperate Daves redeem the most points per user and more inclined to leave reviews compared to other age groups, however they are the smallest population of users.
Passionate Pete
Passionate Pete makes up 41% of our user base. He is 25-34, familiar with cannabis and is motivated by building the cannabis community and being recognized for his efforts.
He has most likely ended up on Lift.co by searching for a specific strain and converted upon discovering an opportunity to share his experiences with cannabis.
Passionate Pete redeems the least points per user despite having written many reviews.
Based on our personas’ motivations we implemented a badging system to solve for both: Passionate Pete is able to visibly grow his status in the community and Desperate Dave gains point multipliers for each tier.
In addition to our badging system we also launched a referral program. The program awards $5 to both referrer and referee, satisfying both personas by allowing Passionate Pete to gain a larger reach with his reviews and for Desperate Dave to easily earn more points.
Through conducting focus groups sessions and user testing we learned the biggest pain point was the complexity of our review form.
What suited medicinal patient needs and motivations no longer applied to the average recreational consumer.
We conducted an audit and removed fields users were leaving incomplete, simplified inputs by removing scales from effects, and rewarded more points per review. What was a 10 minute process became a 30 second experience with double the reward.
In order to fuel even more reviews, we also needed to increase user registration. As Lift & Co. was a new company, we relied heavily on SEO to generate traffic. Our analysis of user behaviour revealed that our personas were landing on product specific pages, then bouncing once they found the information they were looking for.
As they were not exploring the site, our value proposition was hidden entirely. We mitigated this by adding CTAs for logged in and out states of our product pages, encouraging users to either register or leave a review.
Our results were conversion increases of 20% and 52% within the first month, respectively.
These adjustments had increased our monthly reviews from 1.2k to 3.3k. We were continuing to make strides to match our peak of 5.3k as we monitored and adjusted based off of user feedback and behaviour.
There were many learnings from working on this product, but the first was a reinforcement of the importance of listening and understanding your users and their needs.
Secondly, I learned that to turn a failing product around quickly, it was most productive to diversify approaches and launch quickly, then focusing on what was working.