Slyng Deals is a pioneer property in the digital coupon space, with five years of continual growth and tens of thousands of daily interactions. I was approached by Slyng's Marketing and Engineering teams to reimagine the way end users interacted with both coupon offerings as well as their expanding content initiatives. Beginning from the ground up we established a site map and charted the typical customer journey, paying close attention to their best performing pages as well as heat map data to determine where the property most needed attention. What we found was that the typical user navigated directly to coupon offerings from search engine results, and while these pages performed well, click depth prevented ease of navigation to similar offerings. Similarly, the the breadth of information displayed for price tracking and deal comparison was shown to be both unintuitive and overwhelming during surveys and comparative testing. We began by running A/B analysis for layout and interface changes on their best performing pages, dialing in on the most effective data interfaces and comparison UI to both increase dwell time and ensure information could be easily parsed by the end user. From here we isolated the most valuable data points for each product category, creating hubs to best display specifications, price history, and performance statistics for each coupon offered and each store within those categories. With this architecture we were able to eliminate several redundancies, slim the overall site profile, reduce visual clutter and choice paralysis, and and ultimately develop a more SEO friendly site.
With our primary goal of optimized user experience for coupon offerings accomplished, we turned our attention to content and affiliate marketing opportunities which drive the core of Slyng's business. This began with a refresh of the site's content hub, developing a more robust platform to display affiliated products and navigate between review articles for up and coming suppliers. Our goal here was to create the smoothest transition between information hubs and product offerings possible, and we achieved this by simplifying the navigation experience and creating a tiered system to display promoted content. Our content and CMS architecture was structured only after consulting active affiliate partners to negotiate pricing for real estate on page and isolate the most impactful information from manufacturers in each category. This resulted not only in a more interactive relationship with distribution partners but and increase of marketable real estate on each page by 23%. When surveyed consumers found promoted content to be both more valuable and more likely to drive conversion after our consultation. With these optimizations the executive team at Slyng decided to adapt our processes and design methodology to two additional properties under their umbrella, ultimately driving for 2022.
