Groupon
Q4'22-Q2'23
Product Designer
Figma, Illustration, Prototyping, Competitive Analysis, User Flows, Wireframing
Currently Groupon does not utilize SEO's full potential and in turn is missing out on millions of dollars of potential revenue. The goal of this project is to consolidate the existing 'wolfhound' pages that function as SEO pages and combine them with the top category page without interfering with user's purchase journey.
Our hypothesis is that adding articles, text blocks, FAQ and other SEO content at the bottom of a top category page will not interfere with the user experience or purchase behavior therefore will not cause a degradation to CVR. Over time this type of internal linking and content clustering will improve ranking & drive more traffic from SEO.
The SEO team has identified huge opportunities that Groupon was missing out on not optimizing SEO content on Category pages.
As previously mentioned, the goal of this project was to add SEO content to the bottom of the browse page. It made sense on desktop but when it came to mobile web that's where I ran into a challenge. The current mobile web experience has an infinite load, meaning there was no footer a user can access as content loads for them indefinitely.
Another case is the numerous amounts of different 'wolfhound' SEO pages that are ran by the marketing and merchandising team. The future goal is to consolidate all these pages to live on the bottom of the browse category page.
The final piece of the puzzle is creating an updated Business Page. A Business Page is essentially an SEO Merchant Page that can either have a running deal or no deals. Users can directly land on one of these Buisness Pages from their Google search result page.
There are four types of business pages:
- Merchants that have multiple active deals
- Merchants with one active 1 deal
- Merchants with no active deals but had a deal before
- Merchants with no live deals ever and are not part of Groupon
The last type of Business Page got Groupon in a lot of legal trouble, as some merchants have never consented to having their business displayed on Groupon. With that in mind, how do I empower merchants to make the choice if they want to remove their affiliation with Groupon or join the platform?
Before doing any design work I wanted to understand the competitive landscape. I looked at competitors that came up on the Google search results page when typing 'Things to do in Chicago', (Viator, TripAdvisor, Expedia etc) as well as others. I ensured to take a look at both Desktop and Mobile Web pages to understand how information was arranged.
After conducting competitive analysis and gathering data insights, the product manager and I brainstormed features that are needed in order to help improve SEO ranking. We mapped them out in terms of effort and importance, and explained why certain features are necessary in order to reach our goal.
Currently merged pages don’t have text content blocks
on the page which is an SEO basic requirement. Need to add
an ability to call LPAPI and format text on category pages.
Not having FAQs is a missed opportunity to optimize for
the search intent of users and add much needed content to pages. We need to add text functionality with questions and
click-to-expand answers.
Current pages are not inspiring trust with our brand and merchants. We need to create Review Cards to be displayed on local pages based on the top deals returned for that category & location.
Deals on Groupon's local pages are not relevant to the search intent that Google or users expect. This is harming the ability to rank and compete for high search volume keywords. Need to create Attractions Cards to be displayed on local pages based on the top attractions for a location according to Google regardless of Groupon supply. And create a new landing page for each top attraction e.g. Chicago Museum (More detailed Biz Page).
Existing deal cards currently lack description snippets, this is
an opportunity to provide additional page content and also relevant information to customers. Add additional text to Deal Cards with Merchant description snippets.
Existing deal cards currently use static factual information, this is an opportunity to provide additional content and promote inspiration & trust with customers. Need to add snippet of a positive customer review to the Deal Card.
Merged pages do not currently have functionality for
related articles, need to add inspiration for customers, enhances site structure & topic clustering.
After competitive analysis, gather data insights and completing the site audit, I began working along a product manager and content UX writer to figure out the information architecture and flow of all the proposed new SEO features that would be added to the bottom of the category browse page. I knew that I needed to input some kind of visual break between the two different types of content, interactive/purchasable deals and the informational/inspirational SEO content.
The addition of the feature Top Attraction Cards requires creating a new landing page for each top attraction card to the Business Page. I wanted to understand the current user journey as someone finds a Groupon page through a Google search result page. What happens if they come across one of the many 'wolfhound' pages or come across a 'Business' page that does not have any deals running?
I went through many iterations and included many stakeholders throughout the design exploration. The involvement of product managers, engineers and other designers helped narrow down the scope and make important decisions around trad offs. For example, although the concept of using illustrations was beloved by everyone on the team, we agreed that there are scalability concerns and knew that the branding team was focusing on creating new illustration style. We opted to go with simple gradient backgrounds that are assigned to different category groups, providing us a much cleaner look and feel.
The final designs focused on using scalable content that borrowed from exiting design system components. I also focused on solving for the Business Page issue with no deals to empower Merchants to make a decision wether they want to pull their business or join the platform.
Something that I found incredibly challenging with this project was the lack of data regarding the existing wolfhound SEO pages. There were no existing metrics that tracked impressions on the existing SEO pages that Groupon had, so had no idea how users actually interacted with the existing wolfhound pages and what they found value in. There were also a lot of trade offs in this project so we had to settle for different solutions that were within the scope.
Designing for the Business Page was also challenging because there are very fine lines we cannot cross. It was important we ensured that Merchants who have never worked with Groupon can have a way to contact customer support to remove their business from the platform or join especially since they would benefit from a yearly 20 million traffic that Business pages gain from SEO.
