Increasing quote traffic by 60%

The problem

British Gas has a home cover range, called HomeCare, which covers everything from your boiler to your electrics. My scrum team were tasked with increasing the conversion rate going from the landing page to the quote journey. I covered everything from initial research to producing final UI designs.

Outcomes

60% increase in the conversion rate going from the landing page to the quote journey.
40% increase in quote conversions.

Research

Understanding the product range
The first thing I did was involve our stakeholders, especially as they were nervous about the redesign of such a high value area. I sat with them and learnt which products were selling best, both online and offline, and told them that this information would play a big role in how we prioritise content.

Analytics
Using Adobe Analytics, I found that users would navigate between different product pages before getting a quote. My hypothesis was that users were trying to compare products.
I also learnt that desktop was our users preferred device type for this journey, this would help inform designs later on.

Interviews
I then interviewed users to find out what information they needed and why that information was important to them. Users needed to know, in as much detail as possible, exactly what a product did and didn’t cover. Many users feared being told they were not covered when they tried to claim.

Usability testing
I conducted usability testing on the current journey to see where the pain points were. Stakeholders were invited to help build empathy for our users. It also helped them understand our design decisions later on, thus making the sign off process very easy.

Testing showed that users struggled to compare products as they had to remember information whilst bouncing between several product pages. Users also struggled to find details on what each product did and didn’t cover due to the large amount of content being presented. Finally, some of the higher value products that were further down the page went completely unnoticed.

Design

Sketching
Focussing on the pain points and opportunities identified during research, I started sketching potential solutions. The solution I had most confidence in was a single page with a typical side by side comparison table which would allow users to have a quick view of the entire product suite. It would also allow for key information to be highlighted and the easy up-sell of more valuable products. Although mobile users would benefit from the content changes, I assumed desktop users would benefit even more due to the side by side layout. This was ideal as analytics showed that the vast majority of users viewing these products were using desktop anyway.

Usability testing
Using Axure, I created a mid fidelity prototype and conducted user testing to see how much of a difference my changes had made. The results were promising, users were able to easily compare products and the amount of time taken to make an informed decision had clearly reduced. Stakeholders were note-taking in our observation room throughout the day and by the end of it they were keen to get these improvements live.

Final designs
Using photoshop, I created final designs that I then handed over to developers. I used responsive web patterns from the existing CSS which made it consistent with the rest of the website and quicker to develop.

Going live

Outcomes
We went live with an A/B test which saw my solution increase the quote journeys traffic by a massive 60% against control. We also saw a huge 40% uplift in the quote journeys conversion rate. I attribute this second achievement to the improved content providing more clarity and confidence in the product before entering the quote journey.

Continual improvement
I continued to learn more about how the journey performed by analysing user feedback and watching recorded videos. We'd quickly release small changes and see how it changed user behaviour. On one occasion we released a promotion then iteratively made improvements until it performed 13% better than when it first went live.