Special offers on Argos app

Offers are used by many retailers to boost sales and increase engagement with the brand. At Argos, some products have one or more offers available to purchase. Unfortunately, the user experience for buying offers on the Argos app is not ideal and hasn’t been reviewed in a while. Furthermore, the offers journey’s across Argos Web and Apps are inconsistent. Customers can be confused when they see an offer on web that is not available on Apps.

• The ask: Optimise the Argos apps customer journeys for buying offers.

• My role: I was in charge of the UX and UI of the Argos app (iOs and Android).

• Teams I worked with: My product team and the Web product page stakeholders.

• The impact: Improve the “Add to basket rate“ of the special offers section on the Argos apps.

What’s the right problem to solve?

At the beginning of the project, I had two challenges: make sure the journey of adding special offers to the basket was consistent with Web and also explore opportunities for improvement. In order to understand what is the right problem to solve, I wanted to learn as many information as I could before gathering the team and define as a group what ideas to test. My initial questions were:

• Do we collect any data for the “Special offers section“ on Apps?

• What are the main KPIs?

• What are the differences between the Web and App journeys?

• What are the best practices when it comes to adding offers?

• Do we have any previous research around “adding special offers“?

Analytics & KPIs

The first thing I did was to ask the analyst if we had any data around the performance of the current “Special offers“ section on Apps. Furthermore, I asked my PM what KPIs he had in mind to monitor the performance of the solution we would have implemented. This is what I learnt:

• 4.5% of app users are clicking the Special offers section on the product page

• 1% of those customers add the offer to their basket

• KPIs: See an increase in customers adding to basket from the special offers section

Journey mapping

The next thing I did was to map the journeys on Web and Apps, starting from the product description page. I soon realised that the Web journey was showing different types of offers (e.g. “Buy product x & y for a reduced price“ or “Build your own offer bundle“) and also being clearer around the discount customers would get. On the other hand, the apps were only showing one type of offer (buy product x & y) without even mentioning the price discount.

Learn about best practices

After gaining more knowledge about the journeys, I did some reading on Baymard to learn more about best practices when it comes to special offers. These are the key learnings:

• To ensure price-related special offers and discounts are seen by users, they should be placed in close proximity to the product price in the “Buy” section.

• Users must be able to immediately understand the special offers, to respond positively. Users will be frustrated by having to track offer details and discounts that don’t clearly indicate what the offer is.

• It’s important that the descriptions of multiple different offers are written to avoid ambiguity when viewed together. It’s also important to show what the discount of the offer is.

Workshop with the team

It was now time to gather the team and have a discussion around the problem to solve and potential solutions to test. I invited the main stakeholders of my team (Argos app) and of the Web product page team. I facilitated the workshop and used a Lean Canvas to drive the conversation.

Together, we talked about the business problem, business outcomes and known customers behaviours until we started discussing solutions. In the end, we were able to craft the main hypotheses and identify the riskiest assumptions to test:

• First hypothesis: We believe that making the available offers more visible, by moving the "Special offers" section higher up on the PDP page, will increase engagement and conversion.

• Second hypothesis: We believe that differentiating the types of available offers, by using the same offers format as Argos Web, will increase engagement and conversion.

• First risky assumption: Web format is better than Apps.

• Second risky assumption: Current offers aren't appealing because they're all the same.

• Third risky assumption: More visible section means more engagement with it.

User testing

In order to validate whether the risky assumptions were valid, I decided to conduct a couple of tests on UserZoom using different techniques:

• A click test for the first hypothesis and to see if a “More visible section means more engagement with it“ (150 participant of any gender, app users, based in the UK, earning +15K).

• An advanced UX research study for the second hypothesis, comparing the current App journey with the Web one (13 participant of any gender, app users, based in the UK, earning +15K).

Click test findings

Based off the conversation with the team, I mocked-up three variants on how to show the “special offers“ section on the product page (see below). The variant with the section shown below the product price won because is the one that got clicked the most if compared with the other two.

Furthermore, when asked “Where would you expect to be taken if you tapped the View special offers link?”, most participants said they would expect to see ”A list of curated offers for that product” which confirmed the copy used is clear.

Advance UX research findings

After the click test, I created two prototypes for the current app journey and the Web journey. The goal was to show each participant one of the two prototypes, give the same task regardless of the prototype variant (add a deal to the basket) and see how they would navigate each journey.

The current App journey didn’t win because:

• On the product page, many participants weren’t able to find the “Special offers“ section. Some tapped on the wrong sections because they showed images of other products.

• Even if the journey was easy to navigate, the “add to trolley” step didn't "feel natural" and some people weren't 100% sure of what had been added to their basket.

• It wasn’t entirely clear to them what was the benefit of the offers they were selecting.

The Web variant is the winning one because:

• Respondents recognised the “Special offers“ section on the product page.

• They had no issues choosing, reviewing and adding an offer to their basket.

• They went back and forth in the journey from one offer to the other to compare them.

• Price breakdown was key when it came to what offer to add to the trolley. It shows the benefit.

• The final "added to trolley" page was very well received as it made clear what had been added.

Final designs

The UserZoom tests validated both the hypotheses, which meant I could move the section up below the product price and use the Web format to show the available offers. I also took the chance to make some UI improvements (mostly hierarchy of components) before handing over to the engineers.

The A/B test

After the design improvements, we conducted an A/B test on both the iOs and Android apps (18 days for iOs,13 for Android). We selected a small percentage of the customers landing on PDP pages and we showed the new designed variant to 50% of them.

Our success metric (“add to basket” from the special offers section on PDP) was:

• +127% on iOs for the redesigned journey which is a statistically significant result.

• +80.3% on Android for the redesigned journey which is a statistically significant result.

At the end of both experiments, we rolled out the redesigned variant on 100% of customers of both apps.