Brand Design
Sub-brand identities for Insticator's product suite
Product Design
Insticator Embed– an interactive questionnaire for article readers
OVERVIEW
Insticator is an ad tech company that wanted to expand into market research. In addition to offering standard display ad units to publishers, Insticator was developing an interactive questionnaire that publishers could put on their websites to poll article readers about content topics, as well as personal preferences and attributes, in exchange for points, which could be redeemed for rewards.
With this ‘embed’ publishers could learn more about their audience (which would make their audience profiling more precise, and thereby increase ad revenue), while respondents would be compensated for the data they shared, and Insticator would benefit as the platform provider.
But we needed to understand if readers would be willing to engage in this kind of experience on publisher websites, and if such a product would be viable for publishers as well.
OPPORTUNITY
Validate the MVP research and rewards embed.
RESEARCH
I facilitated a series of research and design sprints to speak with over 30 paid research participants and article readers about their experiences with existing research platforms, and to test our embed prototypes. I also ran some embed preference tests, conducted competitive analysis on other B2C research products, and coordinated a few live product A/B tests and multivariate tests to optimize the embed.
The core insights gained across eight studies were:
• Embed page placement was important– in-article placement was perceived to be more trustworthy than margins
• Embed visual aesthetics needed to be improved, and some functionality clarified
• Respondents wanted a reasonable questions to rewards ratio
• Sequencing of questions mattered– content related questions needed to come first, followed gradually by more more specific personal questions
• Respondents wanted direct payments, or a universally accepted gift card as compensation for answering questions
• Interstitial explainer screens were perceived to be unnecessary and hurt quantitative engagement rates
• Special survey offers converted better when formatted in a similar way to previous questions
• Embed page placement was important– in-article placement was perceived to be more trustworthy than margins
• Embed visual aesthetics needed to be improved, and some functionality clarified
• Respondents wanted a reasonable questions to rewards ratio
• Sequencing of questions mattered– content related questions needed to come first, followed gradually by more more specific personal questions
• Respondents wanted direct payments, or a universally accepted gift card as compensation for answering questions
• Interstitial explainer screens were perceived to be unnecessary and hurt quantitative engagement rates
• Special survey offers converted better when formatted in a similar way to previous questions
User research interviews and embed prototype testing
DESIGN
The primary design goal was to address the research insights, make the embed more trustworthy, and create an attractive research and rewards experience.
RESULTS
We validated demand for an Insticator B2C research product, and managed to roll out the questionnaire embed to a number of publishers, and increase its engagement rate by over 50%.
Over time the embed proved to be less profitable then expected because many respondents didn’t want to disclose personal information inside of the embed on publisher sites, and publishers didn’t want respondents to leave their ‘walled garden’ in order to redeem points for answering questions.
So naturally the embed evolved into more of a simplified, sleek, content engagement questionnaire, with relevant sponsored content sprinkled in.
Product Design
Publisher dashboard
Product Design
Commenting widget. Product acquisition re-skin and rollout.
