parterprofiles

Context

New partnerships between Brands and Media Buyers weren’t forming

Brands and Partners come to Squaredance to find mutually beneficial partnerships. Brands seek Partners who can drive users to their site and boost sales, while media look for compelling products with high potential, increasing their chances of earning commissions.

Despite a growing user base, new partnerships stagnated as users focused on scaling existing ones. While scaling is positive, we needed to encourage fresh collaborations. Although partners applied, brands—holding more influence—hesitated to accept due to risks of poor ads and poor quality incoming traffic.

So we wanted to start from the Brand's point of view, and asked,

How might we present the Partners so Brands were more likely to engage in partnerships?

When answering this question, we also wanted to keep in mind Squaredance's values

Research

For insights, I began my user-research

Interviewing brands on what they need to commit to a partnership and how to improve the partner search process revealed the following themes:

Lack of Trust

Time Commitment

Insight : Brands struggled to find & commit to Partners due to poor communication of value

They lacked performance metrics and data to make informed decisions. Partners needed a better way to showcase their value and accomplishments. Brands, resource constrained, wanted quick and clear indicators of potential collaborations, both quantitative and qualitative, but found partner profiles lacking, and uncovering partner fit further seemed was a hassle

Solution

We need to leverage Partner profiles to provide a space for Partners to showcase their value

We wanted to leverage the recently revamped Partner profiles, as Brands were already visiting this space to gather more info. Utilizing the profile's unused vertical space, we wanted to showcased Partner value with quantitative widgets and qualitative case studies, offering skimmable data and in-depth insights with customizable, cohesive design elements.

We focused on releasing widgets/case study in stages

We asked what data was most valuable to Brands to make informed decisions. We bucketed the type of data into qualitative and quantitative. After understanding the Brands’ emphasis on metrics, we decided to release quantitative data ahead of the qualitative. Within each bucket, the priority was given to its impact relative to organizational goals. This approach allowed us to strategically roll out features with the highest impact.

Design Decisions

Widgets: Empty states to encourage adoption

Widgets: Intuitive draft states that mimic final output

Widgets: Fun and engaging active states that show value

Case Study: Engaging and Skimmable

Final Product

With all of those decisions made, we’ve designed and built the widgets to quickly and impactfully communicate a Partner's unique value offerings,

and Case Studies for a more comprehensive communication of value

Results

By improving Partner Profiles, we saw partnerships increase by 15%

Over the 2 months post release, the enhancements fostered greater trust, driving more partnerships by 15%, and overall traffic volume increased by 11% after the release. Widget adoption hovered over 42% per user.

Lessons

Deliver relative to impact

Define organizational goals early, and measure all design possibilities agains thnose goals. Identify which will deliver the greatest ROI. From there, you can plan and prioritize accordingly.

The experience doesn’t start and end at the feature

Launching a feature successfully requires more than just the design & development. Working with a multidisciplinary team, we used email marketing, in-platform banners, visual cues, and onboarding tours to drive adoption and ensure the feature was embraced by users.