Onboarding and personalization

As a Product Designer on RealSelf's consumer engagement team, I personalized the onsite content browsing experience — building an onboarding flow to collect user demographics and introducing tailored sort options. This work helped drive a 46% increase in organic traffic.

Overview

RealSelf’s value lies in the extensive amount of content we offer. Browsing through detailed reviews, before and after images, and Q&A, helps people in their research toward selecting the right provider and getting a procedure. However, the browsing experience was tedious due to poor content management and lack of personalization.

My role and team

I was the design lead for this project and responsible for UX strategy and design. Our team consisted of a product manager, content strategist, and researcher.

The Problem

Due to the suboptimal browsing experience, consumer engagement for our platform was at an all time low.

↪ Browsing preferences are not saved

Data showed that most of our traffic came in through our content heavy pages that displayed user reviews, photos, and Q&A. Although the page was informationally rich, the experience was far from personalized — it was easy to lose your place. As a result, the bounce rate for these pages was very high.

Admins were juggling 5 communication channels — notifications, global banner, an alerts card, onboarding, and a to-do list. These consumed nearly all of the home screen's real estate. The sheer volume left them unable to triage effectively.

↪ Content tagging is inconvenient

Content tagging is laborious for RS content administrators. Our administrators manually go through each review, image, and Q&A to add popular tags based on what information the users have uploaded. This results in a long list of disorganized filtering options.

↪ Managing the feed is not intuitive

The RealSelf Feed is a hub for content related to procedures that users are interested in. However, people have no control over the procedures they follow and cannot filter the content on this page. Consequently, traffic and engagement are low even though the content is tailored to what people have been browsing on the list pages.

Onboarding flow

Capturing demographic data as soon as people sign up will help us store this information and predict browsing preferences. This further helps us pre-select desired filters and personalize the site experience for our users.

Filter and sort on list pages

The information collected during onboarding is used to populate filters across list pages and personalize the experience. Users are then able to sort by "People like me" which shows similar profiles first.

Content tagging

Having collected this information, we can now tag the content posted by our community. Instead of combing through reviews and photos to identify popular tags, our content moderation team can take a step back. posted by a user will be tagged with their demographic information in our systems.

Filter by procedures on the feed

In an effort to increase engagement and traffic on the feed we added a new topic management feature which allows users to add and remove topics as they see fit. At the end of the onboarding flow we recommend exploring the feed — which is now populated with personalized content.

Update the user profile

The demographic data provided by users is stored and can be edited on the profile page. Adding this functionality also aligned with our efforts to migrate the profile to react and improve access to other pages like Favorites and Feed.