Everything Local: Breaking News, Events, Discussions
How my redesign encouraged more user activity and increased the number of promoted posts.
How my redesign better distinguished free vs. paid businesses, increasing revenue.
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Some of the other work that I did during my time at Patch that I believe is worthy of adding to my 'folio.
Primary Product Designer
2 months
UX Design
Visual Design
Accessibility
Figma
Miro
JIRA
After Patch recently redesigned it's homepage, it was time to reassess the rest of the pages on the platform and make sure they were not only aligned aesthetically, but were accomplishing the 'job to be done' for the end user. The Neighbor Post page is a place where Patch users can post their thoughts, share opinions, ask questions, sell items, and more, with the rest of their local community. After looking into the data and doing a design audit of the page itself, I found it was underperforming in terms of user activity as the number of posts had been decreasing over time—not to mention the page itself was reminiscent of a 1990s forum. Time to get to work!
My main goals when doing this redesign were:
The first step in the process here was conducting an initial audit of the page itself, identifying some potential issues with the user experience and developing some hypotheses around why user activity had been decreasing over time.
Current state of Neighbor Posts page
Several things stuck out to me immediately: the social cards themselves had strange formatting, the user reply logic seemed a bit funky, and the feed itself was unorganized, making it hard to find posts I was more interested in. Check out the full audit and analysis in more detail below:
Review the full Miro board here
The next step in the process was getting feedback and opinions from actual Patch users. Given the average Patch user is an older (55+) person, I wanted to understand their unique perspectives and see what challenges they faced with the page. I made a script consisting of open-ended questions to ask and tasks for them to complete, and recorded all the constructive criticism, personal anecdotes, and experience hiccups along the way. The most important part of this process is listening, and encouraging users to share their thoughts openly and honestly along the way.
See the initial feedback below:
“How can I find what im looking for here? I’m not sure who would scroll through all of this to find what they were looking for...”
“Not sure where to start, this page is so busy and I definitely wouldn’t spend time trying to read through the clutter.”
Easy to post here but I have to scroll a bit to see posts I'm interested in. Seems to have more advertisements than real activity.”
The pre-work involved here, including the current state audit and user research, was essential in identifying the key areas of improvement needed on the page and served as the foundation of the focal points for the redesign:
Given the findings from the initial current state audit and user research, I decided to focus on three main pieces that would have the most impact on the Neighbor post page.
Social Content Cards
The component that holds each piece of unique content on the page.
User Reply Experience
How a user replies and engages with another users post.
Social Feed Page
The place where users can view and interact with all of the unique content on the page.
Current state of social content cards (mobile and desktop)
In reviewing the current state of the cards, several areas of opportunity for improvement were found. These main questions guided my future design suggestions:
New social content cards (mobile and desktop)
On top of an overall visual refresh, a few key improvements were made:
Current reply experience
In reviewing the current state of the reply experience, several areas of opportunity for improvement were found. These main questions guided my future design suggestions:
New reply experience
On top of an overall visual refresh and reformatting, a few key improvements were made:
Current social feed page
In reviewing the current state of the social feed page, several areas of opportunity for improvement were found. These main questions guided my future design suggestions:
New social feed page
On top of an overall visual refresh, a few key improvements were made:
To tie back these suggested changes to the original goals of the redesign:
Goal #1
Make the social feed easier to navigate and find what your looking for
Result
Improved the navigation of the social feed page by adding category filters and category badges to the social content cards
Goal #2
Encourage more user activity and increase post engagement
Result
Enhanced the community feel of the page by adding a user photo requirement, automatic user reply tag functionality, a refined engagement bar, and a more prominent post button.
Goal #3
Align the style of the page with the recently redesigned Patch homepage
Result
Refreshed and reformatted the content cards and user reply experience to increase overall scannability, usability, and accessibility.
After coming up with a round of redesign suggestions, it was time to get these changes in front of real Patch users to see how they would respond. I polished up the mockups, created a prototype, and conducted a similar style interview as the initial feedback round, with the same set of tasks, to see whether the new changes were effective or not.
Spoiler alert - we got a lot of direct feedback that suggested the changes we're positive:
“I easily found where the For Sale posts were, which is what I wanted to look at.”
“I enjoyed scrolling through the page and seeing what my neighbors are talking about. I found it easier than Facebook.”
“Seems like a lot of people are posting here, is there a way to advertise my business here?”
Although this project went through a successful design process, Patch's engineering team had only a small amount of bandwidth to take on the full scope of the project. In an attempt to make the suggested changes more digestible, I worked with PMs and engineers to split up the changes in a series of development iteration cycles, so that we could make some progress towards the full scope every sprint cycle.
Screenshot of future state vs. interim social content cards
We only got half of the way there during my time at Patch, but I still consider the project a win as some of the changes were implemented, which improved the navigation and usability of the page.
Thanks for reading! 🤠
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Primary Product Designer
4 months
UX Design
Visual Design
Data analysis
Accessibility
Figma
Miro
JIRA
Looker Studio
One of Patch's largest revenue drivers was it's business listings section. Companies could "promote" their own Patch business listing page to be featured in Patch's most popular email newsletter and a few more prominent places across the website. After doing an audit across Patch's platform and doing some analysis within our internal business data dashboards, it was clear the Business listings section was underperforming and revenue was actively decreasing over time, as less and less business were deciding to promote on Patch. Time to get to work!
My main goals when doing this redesign were:
The first step in the process was conducting an initial audit of the page itself, identifying some potential issues and developing some hypotheses around why companies wouldn't want to promote their business on Patch.
Screenshot from Figma and Miro board
Given the findings from the initial current state audit, I decided to focus on three main areas that would have the most impact across the Patch Business listings landscape.
Business Listing Content Cards
How a user learns about a business initially before deciding to click to learn more.
Patch Business Pro
How users are educated about the benefits of promoting their Patch business listing.
Business Listings Page
How a user finds other Patch businesses.
Current state of Featured vs. Free Business Content Cards
These cards serve as the foundation of how users discover Patch businesses across the platform, so I thought they were a great place to start. The main improvement opportunity I saw here was to further distinguish the featured cards from the free cards, to showcase a more obvious visual value gap between the two.
Refreshed Featured vs. Free Business Content Cards (Desktop & Mobile)
With these new cards, a couple key changes were made to get us closer to our goal of further distinguishing the featured cards from the free cards and making the value of featuring a business on Patch more clear (I was encouraged to be aggressive here):
Current state of promote your business information
The screenshot above highlights the only screen on Patch were businesses could get some information about the value of promoting their business. I'm not sure what your opinion is on this block of text, but I was actually surprised to learn that any business had promoted themselves on Patch in the first place...
New Patch Business Pro marketing page
In an effort to package the benefits in a more marketable and digestible way for users, the concept of Patch Business Pro was born! I put together the four main points of value a business would receive from featuring their business on Patch and created a clean marketing page that could be seen by free Patch businesses at any time.
New Patch Business Pro CTAs
In addition to the Patch Business Pro marketing page, I wanted to make the page as easy to find and access as possible, while also pushing the idea of upgrading more across the site. I created a series of CTAs that were sprinkled across the new busines listings page, the Patch homepage, free business listing pages, Patch emails, and more.
Want a sneak peek into the full scope of Patch Business Pro with sign-up flows, email sequences, and user states? Check out the Figma below:
Current state of the Business listings page
The business listings page is the main page on Patch where users should be able to discover and find goods and services they might be interested in. After reviewing the current page, there were some obvious failures that I could tell were effecting the overall value of having a promoted Patch business:
New Business listings page
On top of aligning this page with the new layout and style guidelines from Patch's homepage redesign, some important improvements were made to increase the usability of the page:
Want a sneak peek into the full scope of the Business listings page with all user states and variations? Check out the Figma below:
To tie back these suggested changes to the original goals of the redesign:
Goal #1
Make the value of promoting a business on Patch more clear
Result
Distinguished the free vs. featured business cards, and created the Patch Business Pro concept which groups all the benefits of upgrading simply
Goal #2
Increase the overall usability of the Business listings page
Result
Added the ability to filter through Patch business categories and minimized the third-party Thumbtack integration
Goal #3
Make promoting a businesses on Patch easy to find and simple to do
Result
Created a variety of Patch Business Pro CTAs that were spread throughout the platform and within the flow for free businesses to see
After implementing these changes live on Patch, within the first three months we saw some early signs that these changes were overwhelming positive in moving the needle towards our overall goal of increasing revenue in the business listings category by getting more businesses to upgrade to Patch Business Pro.
⬆️ 40%
Increase in average number of businesses listings created on Patch
⬆️ 35%
Increase in free business listings upgrading to Patch Business Pro
Although these changes were very effective in moving the needle for the Business listings revenue, they just scratched the surface of the work needed to be done. Next up was completely redesigning the actual business listing details page itself, which I'll give you a sneak peek of here:
Old Business Details Page
New Business Details Page - Owner view
The main challenges I faced during this process were actually tied to trying to advocate for the design process and perspective within the context of a panicked leadership team, who were often pretty strongly opinionated about what they thought needed to happen regardless of a proper product design analysis. In doing my best to compromise where needed, this project turned out to be rewarding in that I got to see some positive outcomes that were directly correlated with my redesign efforts.
Thanks for reading! 🤠
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One of Patch's most visited platform categories is the Events page. In an attempt to encourage more people to promote their free events, I worked to bring some new ideas to the Events page, and further distinguish featured events from free events. This work was done within the context of a dedicated Events workshop, over the span of a week:
Old Events Page
New Events Page
At the core of Patch's mission are the local articles written by journalists dedicated to keeping the community in the loop. On top of aligning the main article page with Patch's new design guidelines, the desktop page needed to be revamped in an effort to increase the overall time spent on the platform.
Old Events Page
New Events Page
Check out the desktop prototype for this design. Slowly scroll down the article page to see the top nav disappear, scroll back up to see the top nav bar reappear.
Link to prototype
Thanks for reading! 🤠
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