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Instacart

The right content for the right user

Understanding customers at any point in their relationship with Instacart and deploying "just right" content to promote incentives

OVERVIEW

  • My role: Content designer, UX writer

  • Other team members: 3 product managers, 3 UX designers, 2 researchers, 16 developers

  • Timeline: 3 months

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CHALLENGE

There is a long list of potential incentives, uncoordinated systems, and cluttered UI, resulting in competing messages and a confusing customer experience

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SOLUTION

  • Understand our customers

  • Deploy the right incentives, messaging, and content

  • Unify backend systems to remove silos

  • Improve growth velocity with improved testing and measurement

Naming rationale.png

To maintain professional integrity, some parts of this project have been blurred or replaced with placeholder content.

UX RESEARCH

User mental models, personas, and user stories

Instacart has a lot of research on our customer base and categorize our users as new, activated, tenured, and churned. Within those categories, our customers follow the mental models of seekers and stumblers. Seekers "seek" savings and search for deals promotions. Stumblers "stumble" on discounts when eligible items are added to their carts as opposed to actively searching for them. Using this research, I sought to answer two primary questions: (1) What do we want the user to do? (2) Why should they care? and created personas and user stories for each user category (which eventually turned into an Instacart app persona library for the entire consumer organization).

First-time user persona.png
Tenured user persona.png
Churned user persona.png

PRODUCT AND CONTENT STRATEGY

Framework and taxonomy

I took a holistic view to analyze how different parts of the Instacart incentive system interact with each other and purposefully made decisions that had a positive impact on the entire system, not just the individual pieces. I prepared a framework that outlined long-term implications of product decisions. For example, since we were combining multiple systems (from UX and marketing teams) to create one incentives system, I created a strategy that depicted how we could make a more desirable product for our customers by realizing the overlap between marketing and UX. To foster understanding and adoption of this strategy, I created key terms and taxonomy that I socialized throughout the entire product, engineering, and design organization.

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UX WRITING

Writing for all user types

I worked within numerous constraints to transition Instacart incentives to an automated system focused end-to-end on the customer experience with clean and reliable data to showing the right message, to the right customer, at the right time. For seekers, we highlighted savings as much as possible throughout the user journey for quick discovery. For stumblers, we tried to not bombard them with deals and promotions but did provide them with entry points on highly frequented surfaces (such as pop ups and in-feed components on Home).

Messaging approach

I employed companion messaging that served as a supportive element to aid user comprehension. Companion messaging included dynamic content that clearly guided the user through their incentives journey while shopping on Instacart and encouraged order completion.

Naming and content rationale

I was incisive in my approach to the customer-facing name for the component that house all incentives. "Offers" is the umbrella term for all promos, deals, and rewards funded by Instacart or our partners. It was a cross-functionally agreed upon term. Also, from an industry perspective, companies like Starbucks and Target also use the "offer" terminology so it's familiar to the typical Instacart user.

RESULTS

Roadmap to ML-powered, personalized user experiences

This work has significantly deduped internal efforts, improved the UX for all user types, and enabled teams to focus on building more valuable customer experiences. Revenue increased in a very short time period encouraging the company to further scale the work. We’ve had increased order rates and larger cart sizes in upwards of 25% for both.  To help with scalability, I created a content library with all offers to increase efficiency and reduce engineering and design debt.

Image intentionally blurred.

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©2024 by Nicole Woodson

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