Product Design Portfolio

Wedding websites

Wedding websites on The Knot

 
 

About this project


Timeline
Multiple quarters, 2022 - 2023


Contributors
Karishma Kapur, Senior Product Manager
Dave Jules, Senior Product Manager
Camilla Cusani-Visconti, Product Manager
Christine Choi, Senior UX Writer
Rob Isaac, Engineering Manager
Adam Lior, Engineering Manager
Angel Esquembre, Senior Data Analyst
Sarah Selph, Senior UX Researcher
Michelle DiBartolo, UX Research Manager
Kalyn Conley, Senior Product Marketing Manager




 

The Guest team is responsible for guest communications tools, including the feature that couples most often discover us through & come to us for - wedding websites.

As the lead product designer on this team, I’ve been heading up the charge to improve this feature. I’m working closely with my PM and Engineering partners using a data driven, user centric approach.

 
 

Project TLDR

In Q4 2022, the Planning & Guest zone had a shared OKR: increase traffic & completion of the wedding website setup flow. Our team improved completion by 4% on mobile web and 18% on iOS. We also added filters, a highly user requested feature, and missing iOS functionality.

Setup flow completion only measures an early moment in the user journey, and whether couples ultimately share their site is the more important metric (adoption). After this work wrapped, I created a research initiative to dig deeper and share my findings across the org.

Design Process

I began by auditing the existing experience on TK’s wedding websites, and the competitor landscape. Although our competitors offered more robust and modern visuals, we knew we couldn’t accomplish that type of update in the one quarter that was allotted. Instead, we set our sights on practical improvements.

Screenshots of the existing experience on TK, across platforms

Screenshots of Wix

Screenshots of Zola, with a comparable preview flow to Squarespace


User research

Coming into the quarter with the zone wide initiative to increase traffic to wedding websites, we ran user testing on the existing experience to understand more about user expectations and sentiments.

 

Screenshots from the existing setup flow on TK

Learning objective

Assess whether users find the WWS creation flow and select editing tools quick and easy.
Assess what additional features users may expect.

Assumptions

- Filtering themes has become industry standard functionality and users are likely to notice we don’t have it.
- Most of our competitors offer very robust preview experiences, including fully functional and attractive example sites, making our offering look dated in comparison.

What we tested

The WWS setup process, preview mode & changing the theme after setup


Methodology
Unmoderated User Testing

 

Unprompted, more than half of the users conveyed that they wished filters were available to narrow down their search. Both style and color filters were mentioned consistently. One user conveyed that they were looking for orange themes specifically, to fit their autumn wedding.

Our team advocated to add filters against a lot of pushback. Publishing our research article to the organization’s UXR platform helped to communicate across teams and gain alignment.

Outcomes

Our team was able to make a number of impactful updates across platforms, including filters, adding missing iOS functionality, quality improvements and more.

Tweaks to the styling of the theme grid help to improve overall quality

Filters have been highly requested for years

We tested a version with mobile that failed

Here users could scroll within the frame to see more of the design, but this test also failed

We were able to make great improvements to desktop, mobile web and iOS. The two most impactful updates we made were on mobile web and iOS, improving conversion by 4% and 18% respectively.

Step 2 on mobile web had been missing a view of the design, leading to substantial dropoff

Changes to iOS drastically improved the styling and proportion of design thumbnails

Next steps

It was clear that there was more valuable work to be done around this feature, and to that end I led a deeper investigation. Although it is a free tool, the importance of this feature cannot be understated:

  • Wedding websites are the #1 reason that couples come to The Knot.

  • About half of couples know The Knot from visiting a loved one’s wedding website.

The overall completion rate of this flow improved from 71% to 79%, but our adoption rate was at a mere 37%. When we dug deeper, we discovered the way we derive that adoption metric proved to be flawed as well, further indicating the need for improvements across product and data. We put together a deck to share with the greater org, including data & context, a competitor audit, past work on the feature and a list of opportunities — and successfully got additional work prioritized for Q1 of 2024.