understanding user needs to address business priorities: exploring new paywall solutions for a subscription-based content platform
timeframe
skills & methods
company
industry
april 2024 - present
user research| service design | experience design |user interviews| focus groups | wireframing | prototyping | painted door AB testing
Which?
B2C | consumer goods | subscription business
overview
problem
Which? is the UK’s consumer champion - a consumer rights organisation that offers independent reviews and expert advice on a wide range of consumer products and services.
This ongoing project has focused on exploring new and alternative ways for our users to access us.
So why this project and why now? Well, there was a very practical reason - the organisation needed to find a new identity and access management (IAM) solution. But this was also a huge opportunity for the business to address some important known problems:
we are losing members
people often can’t access us in a way that suits their needs
some users do not find the service regularly useful enough to warrant an subscription
users: who we are solving for
roles & responsibilities
We describe our target audience as people who have the Which? Mindset - that is, people who enjoy research, prioritise quality (products and services, not just the cheapest!) and are thoughtful in how they make purchasing decisions.
Team lunch on a rare sunny day in London
I am the Product Designer/Design Lead on this project. I work alongside an absolutely brilliant squad, including a Product Manager, Back-end and Front-end Engineers, User Researcher, Experimentation Manager, Delivery Manager, and Digital Analyst.
In addition to our squad, we collaborate closely with a cross-functional working group including stakeholders from Commercial, Content, Audience, Brand and Comms, Security and Legal.
scope & constraints
This project has involved working very closely with cross-functional teams, all of which have their own priorities. As such, shifts in scope have occurred, and my squad has had to be agile and adapt.
Additionally, there was initial nervousness from stakeholders on this project due to the risk of cannibalising our membership base.
early discovery
To define the problem and scope of the project, I worked closely with our user researcher to conduct stakeholder interviews. This uncovered some of the risks (cannibalisation), opportunities (to bring in a new audience who are currently underserved), and expectations (reduce subscriber churn) for the project.
We started by performing a meta analysis of all of the relevant research we had from across the organisation (incl. user and market research, survey data, site and app analytics etc). Utilising this existing research gave us a much clearer understanding of what we didn’t know about the problem and what we needed to find out.
subscribe. use. cancel. repeat.
early insights
ideation & proposition designs
new learnings & iterating
Snippets from the stakeholder interview analysis and the meta-analysis
There was strong evidence of users ‘dipping in and out’ (subscription hopping). For example, of all members who cancel in the first month, a significant percentage do so in the first week.
People often join as a member for a specific need or ‘big’ purchase and therefore don’t necessarily need an ongoing subscription once that need/purchase has been met.
Using these insights, I facilitated an ideation session to build various paywall propositions, trying to strike the right balance between meeting user and business needs.
At this stage I explored lots of different ideas, a healthy dose of good ol’ divergent thinking, and we included our stakeholder working group to ensure we were utilising their institutional knowledge.
I wanted to get quick feedback from users on some of the proposition ideas, so I created some lo-fi wireframes to use as provocations to test with users.
Lo-fi wireframes used to get rapid feedback
User interviews and focus groups gave us valuable insights into which propositions resonated with users and their needs. This really helped us graduate from volume to quality of ideas. We identified 4 opportunity areas and, crucially, areas that were not worth pursuing.
key insight: the goldilocks effect
People don’t want to pay for too much information, when they only need to access some of it. But they also don’t want their access to be so narrow that they can’t achieve their goal in using our service.
With this, we continued to refine the balance between pricing and usage.
what users say
vs.
what users do
experimentation
painted door / AB testing
Cannibalisation of our membership base is the biggest risk in this project, so we needed to validate what users were saying (‘this solution meets our needs!’), was also what they were doing (or going to do) in order to de-risk the solutions for our stakeholders. We needed to give them (and ourselves) more confidence that we were going to build the right solution.
We ran painted-door AB tests on the site to gauge real user appetite. In one experiment for example, our hypothesis was proven to be valid - we observed significant interest in the proposition as well as an overall uplift of 17.8% uplift - an unexpected and interesting outcome. I included surveys in these tests which gave us further insights that coloured the quantitative data we had gathered.
outcomes
reflections
This project is still live, so I can’t fully report on conclusive outcomes yet, but we are currently working on how we can deliver an MVP solution.
Reflections I’ve had on this project so far include:
1 collaboration, collaboration, collaboration
Team work really does make the dream work. Working with cross-functional teams can have its challenges, but it is also a valuable opportunity to leverage other people’s knowledge, experience and expertise.
2 communication is key
Speaking different ‘languages’ has been incredibly helpful during this process. How I communicate an idea or design to engineers vs to our Commercial Director needs to address completely different mental models, concerns and priorities. Understanding the diverse perspectives of different stakeholders has made a huge difference in getting buy-in and working effectively and efficiently as a team.
3 being the voice of the user
The most effective way to advocate for the user has been to find and make a business case for user-centricity, particularly considering the commercial implications of our paywall work on the organisation.