This was a side project initiated by me. It's been a piece of work where explorative research has helped define a product strategy to make the experience of Sky Bet (and soon others products across the portfolio) better for users.
The challenge
I'm part of 'Core Tribe' which is a central team that looks after payments, account management, and safer gambling digital touchpoints across 12 products.
After creating an account and logging in, all these services can be found under a profile icon in a section called 'My Account' (as shown in the video).
I wanted to assess this structure for 2 reasons:
- I had a niggling question; is this the best way we can surface the services we own to our customers? in other words, is the information architecture based on users' mental models?
- My colleagues would also ask "what's the future of sidebar'? It looks like something from 1990s". But nobody had any ideas what it could be. Prior to me, some other designers and researchers had tried inviting the whole team to chip in and provide feedback and suggest alternatives by looking at competitors.
From my understanding, there were 3 important factors which had crippled decision-making historically:
- Lack of understand of users and their needs and expectations
- More than 76% of all transactions (~ £608,000,000 in 2019) would go through this sidebar. Any change to this area would make many senior stakeholders uncomfortable
- The ownership of the whole sidebar would fall between the boundaries of squads (smaller teams).
The Approach
I tried to understand customers' mental models to improve how people could find things on our website.
Alignment
I managed to get stakeholders' agreement to give me the bandwidth to undertake some user research alongside the design work I had to do for roadmap items. I also secured the budget to recruit the right participants from our own customer base.
User research
I led the research using the following methods...
- 2 open card sorting studies; 1 for Sky Bet & 1 for Sky Vegas. The study included all the actions a logged-in user can take.
For analysis stage of these studies, I led sessions with designers and product managers from 3 different tribes.
The findings were eye-opening and instantly grabbed the attention of leadership teams on different levels of the business – I presented findings and next steps to my team, some other product teams, and a group of business leaders. For example, the findings showed that our org structure had significantly influenced product's navigation and had made the product less intuitive. Less than 45% agreed with the categorisation of actions that we had on our products.
- 1 round of tree test; with 10 critical journeys or tasks on Sky Bet. This was to benchmark the current situation, identify paint points, and quantify them. Example of these tasks are placing a bet or playing a gambling game, using safety mechanisms to not overspend, or adding money to their account.
This helped to highlight some of our customers' pain points so that we could plan and prioritise which areas needed improvement. It also helped us benchmark how the navigation works and allow us to explore alternatives cheaply and quickly. Ultimately this meant reducing risk before investing time in coding and releasing a solution.
- Analytics; understanding current user journeys and what users interact with. I derived some insights by using Adobe Analytics to understand areas customers interact with more and which areas less so. For this part my efforts were mainly focused on the domains Core tribe owns. This 👇report is an example of the reports I used to inform our decisions.
These research findings (seeing things from customers point-of-view) helped different stakeholders (e.g. product manager, engineers, and architects) to be more aligned and push in the same direction to improve the structure of our products.
Solution finding
I had multiple analysis & brainstorming session to understand what theses findings were telling us and what the next steps could be. I held these sessions with other designers (from other tribes), product managers, business analysts, software engineers, and software architects.
After having a better understanding of what the findings were telling us and gathering different takes on them and some solutions, I led some sessions to sketch and explore solutions. Between a few of us designers, we started tackling the navigation problems without focusing on any specific problem statements. We tried to tackle as many as possible. The reason I tried this approach was to have a more coherent and long-term vision towards solving navigation problems and then walk backwards to define our very next steps.
Iteration 1 ideas
We took the opportunity to take a couple of greenfield concepts with new navigation to a usability testing session and test with potential users.
Iteration 2
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Wallet
From the findings, we refined concepts. A practical small step forward became a clickable balance which shows user's wallet. Wallet was a space for adding money to account but could ultimately house all money-related functions. Below 👇 is the 1st iteration of wallet.
Wallet is available to 5% of traffic coming through mobile web & Android app.
New 'My Account'
Another change we are making based on the findings of the research is a new way of showing My Account. For this one, I'm mainly led the team and facilitated the efforts. Below is a comparison of the current structure for My Account vs. a proposed iteration the team put together. This proposal is technically easy to achieve. The idea is to build, test, & measure as quickly as possible.
Before
After
... More to come
Apart from these 2 examples, there are more changes planned to be discussed. The challenge is some of these changes would involve 2 tribes which makes the planning difficult. The idea is that these 2 initial changes will prove the value enough to get the buy-in to do more navigation improvements.
The outcome
This way of surfacing the wallet is rolled out to 5% of Sky Bet customers and we will measure the following as success metrics...
- perception of ease of adding money to account
- frequency & amount of deposits
- conversion rate for 1st & 2nd-time deposit
The proposed iteration of My Account is now scheduled for deliver in Q1 of 2021. This has been a good example of design having strategic influence for product development and helping with shaping the roadmap.
