The contest microsite hosted a 10-week series and included educational imagery and video assets featuring the vehicles. Users who answered trivia and registered for the contest earned ballots to increase their chance of winning a vehicle. Our team was asked to integrate the series, the contest and the vehicle assets in an engaging way to help gather contest entrants and educate consumers about the vehicle lineups.
The web-series and the automotive vehicles were distinctive brands, each with their unique audience, who didn’t share the same goals and motivations. We also needed to integrate episodes within a contest. This could not be a disjointed experience for our users.
Our strategy was to identify the motivations and goals of each unique user group so that we can contextually reveal prioritized content and tasks relevant to them. Instead of providing all users with all the options upfront, we reduced the number of choices they had to make and incentivized engagement through a gamified experience.
With an extremely tight schedule and no time for qualitative research, I came up with a rapid quantitative method to review traffic data from all sources and form a hypothesis about the target user groups. This helped lay the foundation for prioritizing tasks on the microsite based on each user groups’ engagement motivations.
Using a framework for task analysis, I prioritized the tasks that our client had identified as high value on the microsite to help us focus on priority tasks based on motivation levels and minimize disjointed events for each targeted user groups.
In order to encourage users to come back to the microsite and engage with the content, I leveraged the principles of the hook model to identify opportunities across the website to engage and retain contestants. The most notable component was the design of a contest dashboard that displayed the progress of users on the web-series as well as tasks involved in the contest including answering trivia questions and watching videos.
I created IA diagrams of the microsite and userflows demonstrating the experience of users landing on the website for the first time and register for the context, returning to the website to view episodes, answer trivia questions and earn ballots. I created clickable wireframes of the website and the mobile application and reviewed the visual designs to ensure there is consistency of design patterns and UX best practices across the website.
With the episodes being released each week and the contest including vehicle assets and trivia questions, we worried about a confusing landing page. Our design focused on funneling contest goers and series fans directly from the landing page to their targeted content and ensuring that a cohesive and simplified story about the microsite is presented on the landing page.
We made sure the registration flow for the contest was frictionless and that the series fans could enjoy the episodes without being interrupted by the contest goers. We allowed users to watch the episodes and collect the ballots without registering, but every time they returned, we encouraged them to register for the contest and keep their earned ballots through a dashboard. This resulted in deeper consumer engagement, more interaction with the vehicle features, plus crucial email capture for subsequent lead generation.
