Reducing time to reach record numbers of votes for reality shows
Client: News portal R7.com
Challenge: Record TV reality shows have always been featured on R7.com and the portal offered a crucial functionality for the programs, the voting system for the public. Unfortunately, the system didn't achieve the desired public engagement and required many steps to finalize the accomplishment of only one vote.
Date: 05/2019, São Paulo
Function: UI/UX Designer Full Adj.
The challenge came through a request from the R7.com coordination so that the voting of the live programs would obtain greater dissemination and engagement within the R7.com portal. First I analyzed the existing format and verified that the voting was only displayed on the program page, which had a much lower volume of visits compared to the portal home. During the analysis, it was also raised the question of the user to accomplish many steps to carry out the voting, since the presenter announced that the voting was available in the home of the R7.com portal, however, to get to the page that displayed the voting system the user needed to navigate through the pages of the site to finally vote.
Initial Flow
So we had two challenges within the same project. The first is to decrease the steps that the user needs to take to complete his vote, that way he can vote more often during the period in which the vote is released. And the second is to make the voting box more prominent and easy to access, so we can attract users more and drive them to vote more and more.
Quantitative Research
We start by looking at the data through Google Analytics provided by the portal. We wanted to understand two main questions: - At what point in your journey would you give upvoting? - Which page at the time of opening the voting was most being accessed by the user?
During the analysis we raised these findings: - The user at the time of voting stops browsing when the home page of the program arrives. - Even at the moment of the release of a reality show, the most accessed page of the R7.com portal was Home itself.
Possible product improvements: - Display a highlight of the voting system on the R7.com portal home page - Enabling voting on the voting home - Reducing the steps to complete the vote
Navigation flow From that moment on we redesigned the step by step for the user to take the vote:
New Flow
Layout Settings
After determining the new user flow we designed some layouts to evaluate what would be the best option to follow in the project.
Layout option 1
Layout option 2
Layout option 3
Layout option 4
We opted for the 4th option because this option has a greater emphasis on the image of the participants without much visual pollution, which for our audience ends up being more intuitive to choose a participant in the vote.
Box Development
As it is a project that is always in evolution and development, in the beginning, we based on the old layout of the portal to develop the voting box, throughout the year was developed in parallel the project R7 10 years through it we updated the layout of the site to become more current and dynamic, and thus the voting box was evolving according to the components of each phase of the portal. For the current layout, we used the Design System of the project R7 10 years, based on the number of columns in the grid and the height of the box may vary according to the contents.
Construction of the R7 10 Years Project grid
Voting Box layout based on R7 10 Years grid
Solution
Home Voting Box Versions | Desktop
Voting Box Version 1
Voting Box Version 2
Voting Box Version 3
Navigation Flow from the Home Voting Box | Desktop
Home Voting Box
Selection of the participant
Voting Confirmation
Vote Confirmed with a button to vote again
Voting Box versions on the program page | Desktop
Voting Box of the Internal page Version 1
Voting Box of the Internal page Version 2
Voting Box of the Internal page Version 3
Voting Closing, Winners, and Release Notice Box | Desktop
Box displaying message voting closed
Box displaying a message from the winners of the vote
Box displaying message about the release of the vote
Home Voting Box Versions | Mobile
Versions of the mobile voting box
Navigation Flow from the Home Voting Box | Mobile
New mobile navigation flow
Detected problem
For the voting system, one of the requirements in the development was to display a 300X250px advertisement, one of the most profitable sizes for the portal, and it is displayed during the voting process would increase the numbers for commercial sales. We were not able to do user testing before putting the project on the air and after the first votes an issue was raised by the commercial team, instead of the viewability numbers of this piece improving, it ended up getting worse, which became a concern. Looking again at the voting system, where the advertising is displayed, we realized that the process became so fast that the advertising barely had time to be loaded and consequently the viewability metric fell. On this issue, we did not want to change the voting system step by step, as we were also achieving higher numbers of votes per second, one of our major goals. To solve this problem we decided to change the orientation of how advertising should be carried during the voting process. Instead of loading a new advertisement onto each new screen until the vote was complete, we decided to keep the same advertisement throughout the voting process, from the participant's choice to the conclusion of the vote. After taking this step, in subsequent polls, the 300X250 advertisement got better numbers compared to the viewability.
Results
Despite some obstacles during the project, by changing the navigation flow and small improvements we managed to achieve the goal of increasing public engagement, and as a consequence we achieved record results for reality show voting. Let's go to the numbers: For the same program, using the new voting system we were able to achieve a growth of
170%
in the total number of votes. The system has become faster, enabling users to vote more often in a short time. In the previous voting system 7,000 votes per second were recorded, while in the current voting system 12,000 votes per second were recorded, an increase of
71%
As an ongoing project, there are some improvements that can be developed for the evolution of the service, and motivation does not lack the team always seek the best version of the voting project.
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