How To Post

Simply dumping a link won't work on Reddit (except in particular situations like /r/webdev Showoff Saturday), you need to provide VALUE. If you provide value, most mods won't mind if you dump a link at the end of your post.

Mods give more leeway to someone who's contributed to the subreddit before. Be a member of the subreddit by helping others before self-promoting and more than likely not, you will get away with dumping a link at the end of your post when you do submit something.

Where To Post

There's a subreddit for literally everything. I do design so there are certain subreddits I target such as /r/UI_Design, /r/webdesign, /r/sideprojects, /r/userexperience, etc.

Over time. you will understand how members of the community act towards promotion. For example, /r/userexperience is very harsh towards self-promotion, you need to be providing so much value for the promotion to pass.

Bans

I've had my fair share of bans, it happens and there's no shame in that. You live and learn, don't self-promote a lot, genuinely contribute to the community and you will be fine.

Finally, a little tip that a fellow Reddit user gave, look at how many people are online, it gives a good indication as to when you should post.

What are some Reddit tips you've learned over the years?

If you've read my blog post 7 Websites To Find Front End Projects For Your Portfolio — you've probably seen Good Code on the list. That's my side-project that I've created a year ago but had to pause work on because of my military service.

I'm now done with my military service and have resumed work on the project with so many exciting features and a rebrand.

Insights from Good Code

A few stats that I would like to build a hypothesis around and validate the idea.

👉 With zero Marketing efforts, Good Code has been continuously receiving traffic.

👉 With zero Marketing efforts, Good Code templates are downloaded at least 5 times a day.

👉 With zero Marketing efforts, people are posting their solutions on Good Code for other people to view.

These insights are all great metrics to ascertain that the idea is validated and there is a market for this service, which is why I've decided to work on creating a full-fledged project with all the features necessary for the target user to benefit from.

Features Being Developed

👉 Complete redesign and rebranding.

👉 Ability to post your own solutions and receive back right on the website.

👉 Slack channel for more communication amongst beginner developers.

👉 Subscription for full-fledged themes (think onboarding, registration, dashboards, etc) and source files.

Rebranding Snippets

Landing Page

Challenge View

Updates

If you're someone who's constantly looking for more projects to work on, Codewell will provide lots of free high quality Adobe XD templates that you can use to sharpen your HTML and CSS skills. If you'd like to stay up to date with all the features being built and be notified when it goes public, be sure to subscribe to the newsletter here and follow me on Twitter .

You can find the links to all tools used at the end of the article.

Paid advertising is great and all, but it stops once the money stops. I'm going to show you a step by step guide on how to do keyword research and use that to your advantage to create compelling articles that could potentially grow organically.

To do this, I'll use Splitbee as an example, it's a web analytics tool.

🎯 Identifying your competitors

You need to first have an idea of who your competitors are in the market. A quick search on Google shows Clicky to be a similar service. Great, you've identified one competitor, we need more. Head over to SimilarWeb, search for your competitor's website, and scroll down to competitors. Pick 3-4 competitors and write them down somewhere.

📝 Finding the keywords

You have 3-4 competitors written down, time to know what they're ranking for. Head over to UberSuggest, search for your competitors' websites, scroll down until you see 'View all SEO keywords this domain ranks for" click.

Now click on 'Export to CSV'. You now have a list of keywords in a searchable file. Do this for all your competitors.

🔍 Narrowing down the keywords

You'll most likely have hundreds of keywords in 1 CSV file. Import your CSV file into Excel. Apply conditional formatting to these columns:

1- Volume > 1000

2- Position < 20

3- SEO Difficulty < 40

You're basically narrowing down to keywords that receive traffic, are ranked either in the first or second page, and are not too difficult to rank for. Do you just go ahead and create an article with all the keywords you've just narrowed? No. There's still more work to do!

✔️ Validating the keywords

After you've narrowed down the keywords, it's time to validate the keywords via Google Trends and/or Google Keyword Planner. Go to Google Trends and search for the keywords you've just narrowed and make sure to set the region to Worldwide. For example, I now have a keyword 'web stats site'. Is it receiving enough interest? Google's metric is /100. Most popular is 100, least popular is 0, and 50 is half-half. My keyword is spiking, at times it's 90, others 40, and sometimes 0. That's okay, we can gamble.

I now have 1 validated keyword, it's receiving > 1000 traffic per mo, it's relatively low positioned, and isn't difficult to rank for.

🖊️ Writing your articles

Now....do you just use the keyword 'web stats site' in your title? No. Be creative. Write a blog article about 'Analyzing web site stats with Google Analytics'. Sometimes the keywords don't make sense, run it through Ubersuggest again and look through the 'Keyword Ideas' section, maybe you'll find a better keyword.

I hope this was a somewhat helpful article to get you into keyword research and planning. It's a great boost and I think you should take advantage of it to boost your organic traffic!

Tools used in this article:

1- UberSuggest

2- SimilarWeb

3- Google Trends

4- Google Keyword Ad Planner

Let me know if you have any questions and I'll be more than glad to help!

Google's new app icons are, well, a massive disappointment. They are so bad, there's a Chrome extension that you can download to restore the old icons. Design changes are always met with some sort of backlash, that's understandable, people don't like change. Facebook's desktop redesign, Instagram's icon redesign, Macbook's touchbar, etc. The problem here; however, revolves around usability, and that's when user feedback should be seriously taken into consideration.

Aside from the icon's shapes, there is nothing else distinguishable about them. They are all made from a palette of four colors; blue, green, yellow, and red. There's a reason why people hate them, and it's not colors, it's usability.

Browsing through the internet, here are some common complaints:

I had to manually change every Google app icon on my Android phone. I had trouble finding the Maps icon even though it is in the same place. All the new icons look similar to Google drive icon.

The complaints all revolve around not being to find the apps they want to launch.

Bring back the old version. Like the new icons aren't even close. They're so unrecognizable that when I go search for them, I forget what I'm looking for before I get to them. It takes me 3 tries to create new events in my calendar or check my email lol

I believe this comment summarizes why this change rolled out and is live

To me, this is a symptom of a large company with lots of internal politics and friction, where it is not safe for a designer to push back and say "no, this is not a good idea" to their manager.

Or, even more likely, someone did, and were forced to execute anyway.

Unfortunately, this is the current state of UX and Design in a lot of companies. Stakeholders are ultimately the one making decisions despite being met with proven statistics from designers.

I also feel like this is a great lesson to any aspiring designer that working for FANG companies isn't always rainbows and sunshine. I can't be sure why these icons rolled out, if it actually was internal politics or not, but it does happen. It isn't always about working for FANG companies, but working for a company that aligns with your values.

See you in another Google rebrand.

Stock Images/Videos

• Mixkit: Awesome Stock Video Clips, Stock Music, Sound Effects & Video Templates. All available for free!

• Pexels: Free stock photos you can use everywhere. ✓ Free for commercial use ✓ No attribution required.

• Unsplash: The internet’s source of freely-usable images. Powered by creators everywhere.

• Burst: Browse thousands of beautiful copyright-free images. All our pictures are free to download for personal and commercial use, no attribution required.

• Coverr: Beautiful Free Stock Video Footage.

Typography

• Typewolf: Typewolf helps designers and developers choose the perfect font combination for their next design project.

• Google Fonts: Making the web more beautiful, fast, and open through great typography.

• FontsArena: Free fonts, free alternatives to premium fonts, done-for-you-research articles. Open startup.

• Speak Human: Generate human centric microcopy for all purposes.

• Font Foundry: A digital type foundry crafting retail fonts and custom typography for various brands. Sharing a passion for premium typefaces, calligraphy and lettering.

Books

• Don't Make Me Think

• Hooked: How to Build Habit-Forming Products

• The Design of Everyday Things

• 100 Things Every Designer Needs to Know About People

Utility

• Checklist Design: A collection of the best design practices.

• AI Image Upscaler: Enhance image resolution with AI.

• Glyphy: Copy and paste glyphs with ease.

Cool IndieHackers Products

• Scale[One new high-quality, open-source illustration each day. Use our color-picker to adapt the illustrations to your brand identity!)

• Free Favicon Maker: Generate favicons and watch a live preview in your tab.

• Colors and Fonts: Find colors and typography combinations ready to copy paste in one click.

As always, if you have any resources you'd like me to post in the next issue, do let me know and I'll have it included if it's suitable.

See you next time!

Should Designers Code As An Employee?

I don't believe designers should know how to code, but I do believe that designers who do know how to code are incredibly valuable to organizations. They're a unicorn of some sort, if you will. There are 2 sides to this questions, to designers, I believe the answer to this question is whether or not you would like to be more employable. To developers, the answer is probably yes, as it will help when having discussions with the development team.

In startups, it's natural that everyone assume more responsibility than they should, that's just how startups are, so if you plan on working for startups, it's safe to assume you'll be more employable if you do know how to code, but also keep in mind that there's the added responsibility of bringing your design to life in production-ready code.

In bigger organizations, knowing how to code can save a lot of time spent going back and forth with the development team to check what can be implemented and what can't.

One of the bigger problems that could stem from designers knowing how to code is tunnel vision. You get hung up on the technical details so much that you limit yourself in terms of thought process which directly contradicts what UX is all about, user-centric design, and not technology-centric design.

Should Designers Code As An Individual?

One of the few reasons I took interest in coding was to bring my ideas to life. I wanted to start something of my own and I believe a lot of other designers feel that way. A year ago, I launched designtarget.org – it was relatively successfully (at least to me, over 20k+ users and I learned so much during that time). None of this would have been possible had I not taken interest in coding, I wouldn’t have been able to launch the early versions of the website on GitHub, nor would I have, a few months later, moved to WP, and I definitely would not have been able to move later on to VueJs.

I took interest in coding, and it has helped me tremendously, I was able to start something of my own and it was invaluable to me as a designer.

Final thoughts? You do what you think is best for you and your career. Don’t feel pressured into anything, but know the benefits.

Do let me know in the comments below what you think. Let's get a discussion going.

A UX Writer simplifies the usage of a product or a service by choosing simple words. A Copywriter attracts customer through storytelling and choosing inviting words.

See the difference? One works in Marketing, the other works in UX. With that out of the way, I chose 4 apps/companies that I believe excel in UX Writing. Let's get right into it.

Netflix - Preventing Potential Confusion

Netflix cures a very irritating problem I have with most subscription services. They don't necessarily tell you what you're signing up for when you're starting a trial, will you be charged right away or when the trial ends? Will I receive a notification beforehand? These are all patterns some companies use and rely on to generate revenue from free trials. They expect you to forget and eventually get charged.

There really cannot be any confusion to any potential customer regarding when they'll be charged, it's clear as day.

Google - Explaining Why Certain Information Is Required

Know how when you're signing up for curators you're asked to pick topics, artists, etc? Well, the reason is pretty obvious in this scenario, but there are times when it isn't and it's always great to explain to the user why you need certain information, especially if that information is private.

Another great example of this is Aaptive, an app that provides you with trainer-guided workouts on demand.

Duolingo - Encouraging Interaction

Really any product or service's goal is to increase user retention and time spent using said product or service. A good way to do this is to encourage interaction only when needed. Duolingo is a popular app that lets you learn languages in a fun and engaging way, most likely than not users will sign up for an account to continue learning and save their progress in order to reach their goal of learning a new language.

NPR - Encouraging Action When You Come Across a 404

Most 404s nowadays are pretty useless, they just tell you that they haven't found the page you're looking for with an image of Obi-wan. A good 404 error page will give you options. Continue searching, report the missing page, and even suggest content that you can read. NPR does this wonderfully as you can see in the image above.

Thank you for taking the time to read through this article and let me know if there any other amazing UX Writing you've found in an app you love to use down in the comments below!

It's a common problem. Us IndieHackers know where to advertise our products, but not all of us know how to post our products. I've split up this blog post to two categories:

👉 How to get a huge traffic boost for a short period of time with little to no work. 👉 How to get steady traffic by using long-term strategies.

Huge Traffic Boosts

This is a great way to not only gain traffic, but also to validate your idea (if you haven't already). There are hundreds of directories all over the internet that you can post your side project to and in return get huge traffic boosts. Let me go over where to post your side projects, the pros and cons of posting on said websites, and how to post on said websites.

Where To Post Your Side Projects

• Reddit
• HackerNews
• ProductHunt
• Betalist
• Betapage
• Sideprojectors, yes, you can showcase your projects on Sideprojectors.
• Launched
• SaaSHub

There are hundreds more websites you can submit your side projects to, but let's keep it simple for the sake of keeping this blog post short and sweet.

Pros and Cons of Posting On Directories

Pros:

• Free huge traffic boost and all that comes with it. Be it sales, newsletter subscriptions, etc.

Cons:

• Short term traffic. You could very well succeed on Reddit, HackerNews, and ProductHunt and you'd be set for a good week or so, but it'll be drought season afterwards.
• Wrong audience. You're not necessarily targeting the 'optimal' audience by posting your side project on all these websites.

Should you do it? Short answer, yes. Long answer, yes. Despite the low quality of traffic, you'll still be seeing a good portion of your target audience on these platforms. You're not really paying to submit on these platforms, so do it, if it works, good on you. If not, you should have a backup plan (second category in this blog post).

How To Post On These Platforms

I've been waiting for this section. Let's assume you're releasing a website performance monitoring tool called Monitr. Things you should not do:

❌ Do not post your URL on all platforms meaninglessly.

Yup, that's it. So how do you share your product? Well, on websites such as ProductHunt, BetaPage and so on, there really isn't much you can do other than post the URL, but on community-based websites such as IndieHackers, Reddit, and HackerNews, there's so much room for creativity.

i.e. A post about website performance and its role in improving organic traffic with a link at the end of the article. More often than not, well thought out articles will rise to the top and your link will gain exposure. If not, you've added value to the community and you aren't really spamming your link. The mods will not be on your back.

Repurpose the content, you've written the blog post, will you go post that 1000+ article on Facebook/Twitter? No, try to make a simple graphic that will hook people and add your website's link within that graphic and the first comment. People on Facebook generally have low attention spans, so if you don't really grab their attention in the first few seconds they see your post, they're gone.

The point of this sub-section is to tell you to learn the platform before mindlessly spamming your links.

Steady Traffic Using Long-Term Strategies

My #1 lesson learned from my side projects which you can read all about here. What do I mean by long-term strategies? SEO.

SEO is a waiting game. You post your content, and you wait to rank on Google, but you don't just go posting about anything, you need to be smart about what you're writing about.

Pick high volume, low competition keywords.

For example, my last article 20+ Free Design Resources for Developers targeted the keywords 'free design resources'. According to Google Keywords, it receives 1k-10k search queries per month and has low competition, and well, it was a great pick. I'm currently the 10th result on Google for that keyword.

Write valuable posts

If you provide value, you will get noticed. I went ahead and posted my free design resources article on IndieHackers, dev.to, and HN just for the fun of it. I get around ~250 visitors from posting on there. Great, I head to bed, wake up and check my notifications only to find this:

So what's so surprising? Well, the traffic sources. I only posted on 3 websites. But I open up the acquisition tab and to my surprise, my 2nd most traffic source is from a website that featured my article that I didn't even know about.

174 visitors came from traffic sources I did not submit my article to. The article was picked because it received attention on the 3 websites I posted to. Here are the stats for the article on IndieHackers and dev.to

So I post the article hoping for some short term traffic, but what I didn't know is that it brought longer short term traffic. But wait, wasn't this a short term strategy? Yes, but also no.

You're also building backlinks this way. When a high domain authory website such as daily.dev features your website and links back to your website, that is great news.

Setup Search Console and Keep Track Of Your Organic Traffic

Search Console takes longer times to crawl new websites so you may find the results to be a little off at the beginning, that's fine. Set it up anyway, it's a very helpful tool. You get to see what keywords you're gaining impressions for, how many clicks you're getting, and what keywords are getting those clicks.

SEO is a long and tiring game, but once you start seeing results it's a great feeling. You no longer have to worry about constantly trying to find sources of traffic, they just roll in. Let me know your traffic game in the comments below and I hope you enjoyed this article!

Colors

• Color Hunt: Free and open platform for color inspiration with thousands of trendy hand-picked color palettes

• Coolors: Create the perfect palette or get inspired by thousands of beautiful color schemes.

• Colorinspo: Thousands of beautiful color palettes you can use it directly by one click.

• Grabient: Beautiful and simple UI for generating web gradients.

• Khroma: Khroma uses AI to learn which colors you like and creates limitless palettes for you to discover, search, and save.

• Pigment by ShapeFactory: A unique way to generate fresh and vibrant colors based on lighting and pigment, instead of math. Find a beautiful, free color palette in seconds to kick off your next project.

Illustrations

• Blush: Easily create and customize stunning illustrations with collections made by artists across the globe.

• Open Peeps : A hand-drawn illustration library.

• Avataaars: Create avatar illustrations in Sketch App with this free library. Combine clothes, hair, emotions, accesories, and colors. Video 📺

• Open Doodles: A Free Set of Sketchy Illustrations.

• Lukaszadam: MIT licensed SVG illustration images in different shapes & styles. Completely free for commercial projects - no attribution required. Open Source Illustrations.

• Pixeltrue: Free SVG Illustrations AND Lottie Animations are available for free for personal and commercial use (MIT License).

• Uplabs: UpLabs is the place to find high-quality design resources for designers, creative agencies and developers.

Learning Design

• Growth Design: Growth & UX case studies in a comic book format. Improve your product skills with real-world examples.

• Design Better: DesignBetter.Co is the essential guide to the best design practices from top design experts. Learn how to build a world-class design organization and more.

• ReallyGoodUX: Screenshots and examples of great UX from real mobile and web products. Discover the best UX examples—including onboarding tours and walkthroughs, new feature and rebrand announcements, UX copywriting, signup flows and more.

• Laws of UX: A collection of the maxims and principles that designers can consider when building user interfaces.

Inspiration

• Mobbin: A hand-picked collection of the latest mobile design patterns from apps that reflect the best in design. Get inspiration from over 250 iOS apps and 25,000 patterns (screenshots from iPhone 12) available on the platform. Sign up to save your favorite patterns.

• Onepagelove: One Page website design gallery showcasing the best Single Page websites, templates and resources.

• Landingfolio

• Landbook: Design gallery with the best and most carefully collected websites. We help creatives find inspiration & motivation to do rad stuff.

That's it for this issue! Be sure to leave a comment if you feel like there's a resource that should be in any upcoming issue.

Let's Onboard

Right off the bat, you’re greeted with clear questions, descriptions, and illustrations. One of the mistakes a lot of people make when choosing/making illustrations is the lack of relevance. The illustration may look pretty, but it can do more harm than good if it’s irrelevant to your main headline.

They tell you explicitly at the top of the page that each choice comes with a personalized onboarding experience.

We’ll streamline your setup experience accordingly.

It makes sense. People using Notion for their own personal use will have their own way of using Notion, while teams will more likely require more collaboration.

Let’s choose For myself.

Idleness Aversion

Once you click ‘Take me to Notion’, you aren’t just kept waiting. They provide you with feedback. ‘Getting ready’. This is a concept called Idleness Aversion and it’s present in hundreds of apps. Uber being one of the famous examples all around the internet.

When you call in an Uber, you’re provided with real-time graphics of where the driver currently is. This is much better practice than just showing a static image of a car. This simply removes the anxiety of not knowing where the driver is and whether you’re going to be late or not.

This applies to any loading message you receive, it gives you feedback so you don’t have to wait around not knowing what’s going on.

Templates

We know trying out a new platform can be scary. Here are a few templates you can choose from to test out Notion with.

Everything else is blurred out to keep you focused on what Notion is trying to accomplish here. After you’ve selected a template, chances are, you still need some training to do. Here’s where the ‘Getting Started’ page comes in handy.

The Getting Started page contains 4 tutorials to help you get started and a link at the end to their Youtube channel with more than 50 tutorials to help you even more.

That's it!

Their Personal Onboarding experience is that simple. They use simple language, simple illustrations, and simple design to guide you through the most important stage of any online service. It’s a make-or-break point and Notion’s got it right.

The idea of creating something that thousands of users could potentially use was just so exciting to me. Over the course of just shy of a year, I worked on 2 projects that made me less than $20, combined, so I feel like it's safe to say I can share my experience with you guys and hopefully you'll learn from my mistakes.

designtarget

Oof, designtarget was a wild ride. On 18-8-2019, god knows what happened but I just hopped on Namecheap and purchased the domain designtarget.org with no prior experience in web development. I was just so into the idea of creating the 'ultimate design directory' that I really didn't think anything through. How would I monetize the platform? Do I even have a list of resources that I can work with? Where will I market the website? So many questions, and little to no answers.

I remembered seeing an ad for a visual editor plugin on Wordpress called Elementor, it seemed intuitive so I go to Namecheap's cPanel and install Wordpress, purchase a year's subscription to Elementor and I get building. Literally next day I was done, I didn't think the design through, I just wanted to get an MVP out right away, and this atrociousness was born, but I was proud of it. I had no web development knowledge and I made a website, and it felt great.

Naturally, I wanted people to see what I had built, so I go on Reddit and post the website on /r/webdev - no it wasn't a Saturday(you can only post your work on Feedback Saturday on /r/webdev), yes the post was locked. But that doesn't matter, why you ask?

8.5k visitors in less than 2 hours of being on reddit when I wasn't supposed to. I knew I was onto something, but a little after the hype died down, it dawned on me, I just missed a huge chance to build an audience. I rushed creating the website that I missed some essentials such as creating a newsletter sign up or even just a blog.

Fast-forward a few months, I eventually create a newsletter, Instagram page, and even a blog.

📧 ~300 newsletter subscribers.

📸 ~400 Instagram followers.

and most importantly, my blogs were ranking on Google. I don't have Search Console screenshots but I had ranked around ~11th or so for a few articles.

I had solved the traffic problem of any side project, but monetization was where this project went downhill. I simply had no monetization plan whatsoever. And this is where the story of designtarget, ends, well, I sold off the project for a measly amount but that was it.

Lessons learned:

👉 No matter how excited you are, keep cool and think things through.

👉 Traffic is easy, business is hard.

👉 Think things through, but also do not spend much time working on an MVP.

👉 It is fine to not know what you're doing.

Good Code

This one is close to my heart, it really is. You can read my post on IndieHackers to know why I stopped working on Good Code.

The idea originally came to me when I discovered Frontend Mentor, by then I had learned HTML, CSS, and a little bit of JavaScript and wanted to improve my skills. I liked FEM, but the free templates were just not the level of design I wanted to work on, queue Good Code.

This time, I was ready, monetization plan was straight-forward, content was ready, community building was in place, newsletter was in place. I cook up a static version of the website using HTML and CSS and release it on Github Pages, you can view Good Code here and straight to reddit I go (and IndieHackers this time as well).

September 3rd, to September 15th. I was onto something, again. Shortly after launching, I view my Gumroad page only to find 2 customers have purchased templates for a total of $10. My first internet money!

I also had people posting their solutions on the subreddit I created just for this website, it felt great.

I really wanted to continue working on Good Code, as it stands, it's only hosted on GH Pages, so there's a good chance there could have been more sales had it been on an actual domain. I might resume working on Good Code in a future date, but for now, I'm pausing for reasons listed in the IndieHackers post.

Lessons learned:

👉 Spin ideas. I could have just released this as just another website selling Adobe XD templates, but I feel like the 'improve your HTML and CSS skills' twist was what brought this to life.

👉 Create a community for your side-project.

👉 Don't be afraid to shut down.

To wrap things up, had I not started designtarget, I wouldn't have learned how to code (albeit being bad at it), had I not learned how to code, I wouldn't have started Good Code and made my first $ from a side-project, who knows what my next had I not started is going to be, but I feel like it might be success.

Stacks is a product that is meant to accelerate e-commerce building through the automation of a number of tasks. The platform launched in 2018 and has since gained a lot of loyal customers.

However, Stacks lacked online presence and mainly relied on word of mouth to gain customers. Moreover, it lacked any of the automation it promised. The aim of this project is to create an entire website that coincides with what Stacks is going to deliver, as well as redesign the actual platform.

Role

Lead Product Designer. Information Architecture, Usability Testing, User Research, Prototyping, reiteration.

The Problem

👉 Information Architecture led to confusion among prospect customers.

👉 No free trials offered. (Difficult to convince customers to try out a service priced at $39 in one go).

👉 Inconsistent visual language.

👉 Promised automation, but everything was done manually by support team leading to higher wait times and clogged queue.

👉 Difficult-to-use platform.

Information Architecture

Tackling the first problem (Information Architecture) was high on the priority list. Here's a rundown of what caused confusion among prospect customers on Stacks. Stacks offered two products, Plates and Outlets. Plates is a theme for restaurants, while Outlets was a theme for e-commerce websites. People would subscribe to these products instead of Stacks. Pretty easy to understand, right? Perhaps on paper, but the implementation was what caused the confusion.

This is called Polyhierarchy. Seemingly different products are listed multiple times in multiple locations eventually causing confusion.

Each of Plates and Outlets had their own landing page, with their own pricing (both at $39) — so then, why would each have their own landing page? And had Stacks added more products, would each have their own landing page as well? It just simply did not make any sense.

👉 The proposed solution was as follows: People are subscribing to Stacks, not the themes it offers. There should be only one landing page for Stacks, and after subscription, people are given the choice between Plates, Outlets, and any other future product Stacks will offer. In a simple wireframe, this is what it would look like after subscribing to Stacks.

Lack of Free Trial

At such a steep price ($39), it makes sense to have the users try out the service before financially committing. Previously, Stacks did not have this option. After some discussion, we added a 2 week free trial.

Problems Tackled and Results

Here was the proposed re-design for the website after tackling the below problems.

👉 Information Architecture

👉 Lack of Free Trial

👉 Inconsistent visual language.

Results were great. We saw a 440% increase in trials. We had previously added a free trial option in the old design, but that only got around ~5 trials per day. With the new design, we started getting around ~27.

People were now less hesitant to start a free trial with the new redesign. Mission successful!

Onboarding Insights

🚀 Onboarding Matters

Onboarding Matters. It should be obvious, but here are is some data to confirm the statement.

👉 40% increase in retention rate after implementing onboarding. 👉 47% from 83% bounce rate.

⌛ Keep 'em loading

Skeleton loading and loading screens, they're there for a reason.

👉 23% of survey participants wanted something to keep them entertained while we uploaded their products.

⚙️ Full Automation or no Bueno

Despite adding onboarding and some automation, users still did not feel like performing manual actions when needed (due to budget constraints). It was apparent they wanted full automation of all tasks involved in creating the e-commerce website as well as the mobile application.