Product Designer | BiggerPockets
USER FORUMS
BiggerPockets is known for their real estate investing community and connecting investors through their online forums platform. In an effort to increase user engagement and retention BiggerPockets was looking to revamp their forums.
THE BUSINESS PROBLEM
Engagement metrics have been trending down for the last year and the business would like to turn those metrics around.
THE USER PROBLEM
Users have a hard time navigating the forums.
Users have a hard time finding relevant content.
Users have a hard time knowing where to post content.
Users want a personalized experience.
THE GOAL
Increase engagement with the forums.
Increase user satisfaction rating.
Increase the success rate for finding relevant topics.
Decrease error rate when engaging with the forums.
MY ROLE
As lead designer, I own the discovery, strategy, and design of the project. I am focused on using data to inform my solution in order to create the best user experience while balancing business goals. My core focus for the project was to improve the taxonomy of how the forums are organized, navigation, layout, and structure of content to improve engagement and retention.
DISCOVERY
Leveraged months of research to inform the designs:
External research was conducted to understand the competitive landscape and to extract product-specific features.
Usability tests, user surveys, and engagement data were accessed to better understand what was currently working and not working for users.
Leveraged user interview data to understand what was important to participate in the forums.
I distilled the collective data to identify user pain points and foundational functions to create a clear benchmark for the updated directory experience.
Key Insights
Users have a hard time navigating the forums
Users have a hard time finding relevant content
Users have a hard time knowing where to post content
User want a personalized experience
Users want to both search and navigate the forums to find information
From there several hypotheses were generated and tested for validation.
THE DESIGNS
Focused on several key areas of the design to improve user engagement and meet business goals.
This project is still in its early stages. As work is being done on the core infrastructure of the forums, work was started on the layout of the forums feed to increase engagement.
V1
Updated the layout of the main feed to include not only the title of the post but a preview of the body of the post to help users understand the context of the post prior to clicking in.
Added in additional engagement elements to the posts (voting, expand the full post, see the number of comments, etc.) to keep users engaged and to trigger the user’s desire to hunt for more content.
Introduced search functionality to improve the success rate of finding relevant content.
Next steps
Introducing a tagging system and removing the concept of categories. This will improve how users navigate and filter content, as well as, improve how they post content.
Simplify the navigation to make it easier for users to find information that is relevant to them.
Provide a more personalized feed based on what users follow and engage with.
THE RESULTS
An A/B test was conducted to test the new design against the existing one. After running for several weeks we saw the following results for the new design:
Daily retention: 10% increase
Forum responses: 15% increase
Forum votes: 22% increase
Forum posts: 20% increase
Switched to old design: 1%
Based on the results we were able to roll out the designs to 100% of users.
Testing continues to improve user engagement and business revenue.