My Contributions

Challenges

Livingsocial is most commonly known for its local deals and consumer facing experience. What you don’t see is the B2B side for merchants. Merchants of all types and sizes use Livingsocial as a platform to grow business. Balancing the needs of consumers, merchants, and Livingsocial, created a never ending list of problems to tackle.

Customers

While I worked at Livingsocial the target demographic was affluent women between the ages of 30-55. One of the key challenges I faced was developing new techniques in customer conversion specific to our user’s needs. To accomplish this, I worked closely with the internal research team, to create solutions rooted in strategy based on our finding. One of the biggest pain points our users struggled with had to do with the vouchers used for deals. The process of handing your phone to a stranger, or printing out a full 8.5 x 11 paper vouchers, or entering a promo code, caused a lot of frustration. The business grew so fast, that it never had time to streamline its redemption experience. The obvious solution would be consolidating those 3 experiences into one. The reality was, merchants had varying requirements when they apply discounts to their products. Due to technical limitations, we could only consolidate 2 of the 5 voucher redemption options, then updated the last 3 option's checkout flows and messaging to be more consistent. Not perfect, but that’s just one example of how we balanced user's needs and business requirements.

Merchants

I learned a lot about B2B e-commerce while working here. While researching some of our Merchant's needs, two pain points seemed to overshadow everything else. The percent of money Livingsocial made per deal, and getting consumers to pay full price for there services/products after they had purchased a deal. The design team couldn’t do much about the 1st issue, but connecting merchants with customers was doable, not to mention part of LS’s promise to all merchants. 

So, what happened? When LS started, users were only allowed to purchase a deal once. Once that deal was redeemed, the consumer wouldn’t see that same deal again for a certain amount of time. The intent was to let the consumer try an experience for the first time with a discount, if they liked the business, they would return, then pay normal prices for that service or product. Everybody wins right? Merchant gets a new customer, LS makes money, the consumer saves money, and could potentially find a new business they love.

What happens when you remove that grace period preventing consumers from buying the same deal? You end up creating a new user behavior. Our consumers caught on quick, and would only go to LS merchant's establishments when they had a voucher. This small change broke that trifecta between LS, merchants, and consumers. Fast forward to 2015, consumers are saving more money, LS is making way more money, and merchants are still getting new business. The problem with consumers buying exclusively through LS, is the merchant are now paying LS for a majority of their business.

At this point LS wouldn’t be able to meet their customer's demand if they reinstated the voucher limit. Instead we started expanding on both new and existing merchant experiences. We started by updating the merchant portal with a more user friendly analytics section. Showing the merchant their analytics helped them limit the number vouchers they would allow LS to sell each month. After that we started sharing business insights and educated our merchants. The email campaign was intended to help educate merchants on marketing tactics that would eventually lead to new business.

Products

Restaurants Plus (2014 - 2015)

Rethinking Vouchers
The Restaurants Plus program was another branch of the LS experience. We partnered with Mogl, a similar online deal business, in hopes that it would replace the current restaurants deals, and eliminate the voucher pain points. I worked closely with a Visual Designer and one of our Developers to recreate the Mogl experience under Livingsocial's brand. Restaurants Plus is very similar to a LS restaurant deal. Users who signed up for Restaurants Plus would first register one of their credit/debit cards on file. A user would then have access to a list of restaurants partnered with LS, every time a user uses his registered card at a participating restaurant, he would instantly get a percentage discounted from his purchase. At the end of the month, a user's savings would be directly deposited to the registered card's bank account. No vouchers, no printers, no promo codes.

Restaurants Plus Merchants
Merchants controlled the percentages, and could increase or decrease the percentage based on the time of day. This gave merchants to power to give greater discounts during slower business hours. The next Phase was to integrate some gamification to encourage users to use the app regularly. I landed on a social badging system similar to 4 square or yelp. Users could get bonus savings if they shared with a friend. LS was going to roll out weekly/monthly challenges encouraging users to explore their city. I envisioned larger merchants eventually partnering with LS to be featured on these challenges.

Food Truck App (2014)

If you work in Washington DC, you’re familiar with Food Truck Fiesta. Food Truck Fiesta is a web app that searchs for all of the food trucks in the DMV (District of Columbia, Maryland, Virginia) area. If you’re a Designer/ UXer familiar with Food Truck Fiesta, you know the ascetic and user experience is a nightmare. LivingSocial invested some money into side project that could elevate/replace that experience. I worked with a small team to develop a MVP for our senior leadership and CEO. I conducted user interviews with the President of the Food Truck Comity (Yes that’s a thing) to get a better understanding of the food truck experience. After the discovery phase, and a blessing from the CEO, we went forward creating a plethora of wires, user flows, and prototypes. To differentiate ourselves from Food Truck Fiesta, we were going to integrate time based deals similar to Restraints Plus. The concept never made it to full production for a number of reasons, but we were told to shift efforts to the Restaurants Plus work before the Food Truck app launched.

Merchant Tool (2014-2015)

I helped develop early versions of a digital service that would help merchants partner with LS on there own. To do this I conducted user interviews with our sales team and merchants to figure out a optimal experience for both users. Merchants would have the ability to create profiles, manage deals, view analytics, and extend their digital footprint online. I realized at a very early phase of this project that we would be potentially eliminating a lot of jobs. Whenever we autonomies jobs, I think it is critical to keep the people you’re replacing in mind. By addressing both users, you can potentially create a middle ground for that existing person to transition into.

Site Maintenance (2013-2015)

I was constantly tasked with making smaller site updates in parallel to other work in progress. These were usually lighter lifts like updating the checkout flow, creating product customization experiences, or helping out with internal brand design needs. LS A/B tested EVERYTHING, as they should. I helped the research team A/B test various experiences with users before and after development. Insights from our research helped guide our decision making when updating features. I learned quickly conversion reigns king over ascetic in the e-commerce world. The rule of thumb was If conversion drops, marketing stops funding the idea, or the feature gets deprioritized.

Material Design Update
I worked closely with our developers to redesign the Android app following Google Material guidelines.

Components
In addition to updating LS's apps, I also created a number of site improvements.