Digital Authority Product
The Process
Research
Context
Digital Authority is a free guide that was designed to help digital entrepreneurs and creators build a brand and craft products people love to use.
It’s an education-focused product with the primary aim being to educate the target audience on building an authentic brand.
It also has notion templates that users can duplicate and use for themselves. These templates will help the user implement the things they learned from the guide's content.
Digital Authority’s purpose in the main business (DisplayZen) is to boost the sales of a paid product. Digital Authority helps to prove DisplayZen’s authority and competence in the field of productization and branding.
Competitive Audit
After doing market research and utilizing the market sophistication levels, I came to the conclusion that DisplayZen is in a level 3-4 market.
This means that DisplayZen needs a USP and a good marketing strategy to stand out.
Some competitors include Justin Welsh, Dan Koe, Justin Scott, and Craig Shoemaker.
However, ost lacked a way to increase user retention and also seemed to be less effective at converting the users into customers.
Analysis
Problem Statement
The aim of this product design (UI/UX) is to maximize user retention.
We want to make sure that the users actually finish the content inside it.
This will help to increase sales of the paid product.
Why? If users finish this guide and use the provided resources, they will realize that DisplayZen is an authority in his field.
Thus, DisplayZen will be able to build trust in their audience
Note: I’m assuming this guide fulfills its promise of being an ultimate guide that helps digital entrepreneurs build a brand and craft great products.
Executive Summary
- Maximize user retention
- Design UI that is aesthetically pleasing + persuades/influences users to finish the guide
- Increase customer growth for DisplayZen’s paid product
- Communicate the unique selling point (USP) of DisplayZen to the audience
Ideation
Feature Narrative
- Written version — this allows those who wants to read the guide to do so
- Audio version — this allows those who prefer to listen in their car or at home to do so - it maximizes the different mediums in which users can use the product
- Speed of Audio — this allows people to tune the audio to their liking - for instance, if people find it difficult to understand, they can slow down the audio and vice versa
- Email Sequence — this reminds the users about Digital Authority, allowing them to come back to the product. The emails also include the resources that the product provides. This allows the users to get access to the resources faster — hence, it increases user retention and customer growth for DisplayZen’s paid product as it makes the user use the resources provided. Thus realizing that DisplayZen is authority in the field.
Note: Once again, I’m assuming that Digital Authority actually fulfills its promise of being a helpful guide to its target audience. - Dual Navigation Bar — this allows users to navigate to the other sections with ease instead of finding the navigation bar at the top.
- Branding Checklist — this allows users to make sure that they are moving in the right direction
- Product Launch Roadmap — this allows users to have guiding principles they can follow
- Visualizations — this allows users to visualize what they’re reading/listening to + it also caters to a wider audience of people, and it also has the added benefit of breaking up long paragraphs to make it easier to read
- Responsive design on different screens/displays
UX Writing
For this part, it helped that I had a clear understanding of Digital Authority’s target audience (demographics, pain points, wants/needs)
Since the demographics of Digital Authority are people from 20-35+, it’s safe to assume that there isn’t a need for a tutorial on using the product and it helps that the UI will be easy to understand.
However, optimizing the onboarding process (from entering their email address to get the product → reviewing the product) is crucial here.
This includes labelling the buttons properly and making sure the user knows where and what to do next (UX Writing).
This makes it so that there is less friction involved and also decreases the decision fatigue for the users.
Which once again increases the chances of the user using the product fully.
Design
(desktops/tablets)
(mobile)
Feedback
UX Testing
After publishing Digital Authority and announcing the launch to DisplayZen’s audience on social media, google analytics shows higher usage of Digital Authority (more time spent + most of the resources provided by DisplayZen were downloaded by the users).
Mailerlite (the email marketing platform used for the email sequence) shows an average open rate of 57.4%.
The industry standard is about 15% which clearly shows that the users are interested in using the product.
Google Analytics also showed an uptick in people visiting the landing page for DisplayZen’s paid product.
We were able to track how many people came to the landing page from Digital Authority using UTM-tracking.
✓ ↑ User Retention
✓ ↑ User Satisfaction
✓ ↑ Customer Growth
We also collected feedback from users using Tally Forms which we embedded into the product, making it frictionless for users to review the product after using it.
We received many positive reviews regarding the design and the product itself.
Iterations
However, some users gave feedback they preferred to also have the audio version file included in the email sequence to make it easier to access it.
This prompted me to add the audio to the email sequence and also upload it to Spotify. Spotify is one of the largest audio streaming platforms so most people would have it installed.
Uploading the audio version in Spotify allows users to save and download it, as well as, listen to it whenever they please.
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Digital Authority (live version)
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