Greg Mathews
Babylist is a way for you to create a baby registry from any store. I worked as a Design and Developer contractor—anything I designed, I implemented.
The help center had previously been a neglected area of the site and was not supporting users as well as it could have. We had a short timeline to update the help center with the intention to decrease the number of times users have to reach out to get the answers they need.
At babylist there are two main audience types. There are the users who host their registry (soon-to-be parents), and the gift givers. These two user types have very different and distinct questions.
We wanted to give these users a very clear starting point to find an answer to their question. We prominently featured links to quickly direct the users to their corresponding category.
The most common question that customer support was getting was "How do I give a gift?" because this question was asked way more than any other question, we created a special section at the top of the gift givers help category that visually explained the process.
In addition to providing directions to help assist with the most common question, we added a prominent CTA for the chat support when it was available. Outside of the self-serve articles, chat was the best experience for the user because they get their question answered within minutes and received a personalized experience.
After rolling out these updates we ended up seeing a 10% decrease in incoming questions due to them more easily finding their answers on the help center.
Babylist guides are a fantastic resource for new parents. They include articles about all topics of pregnancy and early child rearing. We wanted to update the babylist guides to make them easier for expecting parents to find the content they are looking for and help parents understand why certain products are the best choice for them. We also came up with a content strategy plan for the week-by-week article series to help parents understand what the expect.
For the week-by-week articles we did a number of user interviews to understand what expecting mothers have questions about, what is good about our competitors current articles, and what we can improve upon.
Through testing, we learned the content that resonated most was matter-of-fact, easy to understand, included stories from other mothers, pictures of different sizes of baby bumps, and a quick summary overview checklist.
A lot of people come to babylist to find the best products to purchase either for themselves or an expecting parent they know. Babylist wants to become the known expert on baby products and does a lot of hands on research to base their recommendations on. We wanted to highlight what the pros and cons of each product and provide the users the option to either add the product to their registry or purchase the product.
With the product callouts we wanted to provide a short summary of the best features and highlight the two main CTAs. If the specific product was available at multiple retailers we highlighted the different options and prices.
The goal of the corporate pages was to showcase how great it is to work at babylist. A big part of working at babylist is the great people that are there. To highlight the employees we hired an amazing photographer. We also highlighted employee quotes, a babylist timeline, and a few easter eggs within the design to give a deeper understanding of what babylist is truly about.
With the error pages we wanted to make them useful but also somewhat fun. We selected the links based on the intended destination and what error they were encountering. For example, on the 503 page, (where the user would be unable to use the site at all) we provided a timeline of when the site would be back and recommended other ways they could interact with babylist, like sending an email and links to our social media.
These pages were super fun to code and each one has a unique animation. Click through below to check out the animations—the 503 page is my favorite :)
