Helping Couples Tie The Knot

As the Product Design Intern for The Knot, I was part of a quickly evolving product organization that created an expert, personal, and joyful experience for every couple in the United States.

My Squad
Local Marketplace
Tools
Sketch
InVision
Slack
Pivotal Tracker
MixPanel
Timeline
9 Weeks

Overview

The internship program at XO Group was 9 weeks long. I spent about a fifth of that time being onboarded, which comprised of browsing The Knot website and apps, reviewing the brand book, copy guidelines, and style guide, read various wedding studies conducted by The Knot, setting up 1:1s with colleagues, conducting a usability audit, and more.


Group photo of the 2017 intern cohort

The squad I was on, which comprised of a Product Designer, Senior Project Manager, Senior Tech Lead, five engineers, and one QA, is responsible for the Local Marketplace of The Knot. This is the part of the site where couples can find local vendors in their area, such as venue vendors. This part of the site brings in the most revenue for The Knot through premium storefront subscriptions.

Overview of my time at The Knot

Upsell Project

The upsell page is the request-for-quote confirmation page, which has suggested vendors for users to view next, based on the vendor they just requested a quote from. I designed two separate upsell pages for unpaid and paid vendors based on findings from the upsell page that was live when I got there. I conducted a design studio with my squad to generate ideas.


From research and interview done before I arrived, our squad learned that paid vendors did not like it when we directly recommended their competitors. As such, the squad curated a matrix of cross-category recommendations based on the category of the vendor they just requested a quote from. With this prior research, I designed the page below.


Design of the upsell page for paid vendors

Upsell for Paids - Early Results

The goal for this project was to get 40% of people who clicked through a category to contact a vendor. Based on early results, this goal was almost met at 38.7%. From August 11-28, this page generated 1,452 additional leads, or 726 leads per week.


Early result of upsell page for paid vendors

Design Spikes

I joined my squad when they were in the middle of implementing a new storefront for vendors. While a majority of the design work had been done before I arrived, I assisted in defining the social media sharing interaction of the storefronts, and how content got loaded. I conducted research, created recommendations, and presented my findings to my squad and the design guild.


Progressive Rendering Project

After presenting my design spike on loading states, my mentor thought there was a good opportunity to apply my progressive rendering findings (skeleton screens) to the rest of the site. I created a word document filled with my research (what are skeleton screens, why are they useful, which websites are using them), examples of possible use cases for other parts of the The Knot, and guidelines for how to design skeleton screens, and when to implement them.