Best Buys Dailymail

The "Shopping Hub" is a white-labeled website with commercial articles, aiming to help users make informed decisions when purchasing products online.

The website provides articles that guide users through identifying options, evaluating them, and making confident purchasing decisions.

The first launch of the Shopping Hub is on the Daily Mail website, under the name "Best Buys".

Users often struggle to confidently purchase items online due to the overwhelming number of choices and lack of trustworthy information.

They need a reliable source that can simplify the decision-making process by providing expert recommendations and comparisons.

The goal is to reuse the shopping hub for different publishers across the globe. Therefore, it needs to be scalable and flexible enough to adapt to different publisher styles and market requirements

Users' final goal is to get the best when buying online, so they first need to discover a range of products that meet their specific needs. They normally do this by searching the product category on Google (or similar providers).

Users seek detailed comparisons, reviews, and expert opinions to assess the quality and suitability of each option. They click and open multiple websites with articles or videos

Users need clear, concise information to confidently decide which product to purchase. They quickly scan through the articles or videos.

Users complete their purchases. They might navigate there from the articles they read clicking on the links provided.

Based on the interviews conducted, users struggle to find all the relevant and trustworthy information in one place. To address this issue, the primary goal is to publish articles with a clear and user-tested content strategy.

An organized and user-friendly website enhances trust and streamlines the user's task of identifying and evaluating options.

To expand the product to other markets and publishers, it is crucial to have a flexible design and development.

After conducting preliminary interviews and user tests, we identified the key strategic directions that need to be considered to create value for the users:

• Trust: Users need a platform where they can find all the necessary information and rely on it.
• Usability: The information should be presented in a concise, well-structured, and easy-to-compare manner.
• Savings: The solution should be offered at the best possible price.

To test assumptions and ideas on the content strategy, we launched an MVP. The following features have been identified as the core requirements for the initial version:

• The article's core content, with images, links, titles, paragraphs, and bullet points.
• A structured architecture, with on-page and through-page navigations and related content connections
• Aggregation pages to structure the content, with a home page, category, and sub-category pages

To establish the product strategy and determine the appropriate direction, we conducted a Value Proposition workshop using a technique developed by Strategyzer. The workshop aimed at identifying the value of our product, differentiating our product from competitors, and establishing metrics to evaluate its effectiveness.

1. Transparency is crucial in building trust, and we need to communicate it. When suggesting products, we don't need to be experts in every field. Instead, we can seek help from specialists to determine the best options.
2. One of the biggest pain points we discovered through interviews and usability tests was that users have difficulty comparing products. We aim to provide a solution to this problem.
3. Leverage Global Savings Group's expertise in finding the best price for any product.

To create a product that can adapt to various partners and markets, we opted for using a "Design System Approach".

This approach aims to prevent the repetition of components, maintain consistency, and enhance the efficiency and speed of both design and development processes.

The pages and components have a flexible layout, which can be easily adjusted in width while retaining the same structural rules.

Every element is designed with the default style guide based on design tokens. To launch a new platform, all that is required is to define the new values of each token in the style guide.

This definition is created according to the partner style guide and provided by the design team in Figma. Developers can use the Figma Tokens Studio plugin to easily access the values and replicate them into the code.

While working on this platform, I got the opportunity to be a part of the team responsible for defining the content and product strategy. We utilized various tools and canvases like the "Value Proposition Canvas" by Strategyzer and the "Definition of Retention Metrics" technique by Reforge.

This experience helped me widen my perspective and taught me how to research to launch a new product successfully.

I had the opportunity to implement a design system approach for the first time in a product, even though it's an ongoing process at the company.

Although it's not a complete design system, it significantly reduced the effort and time required for content scalability and flexibility. This approach has been used for every new launch in the company since then.