Haystack is a pre series A startup that helps techies find their ideal tech opportunity. In order to meet revenue targets, the product team was given the challenge of developing revenue generating features. After much ideation, the focused landed on sponsored job listings for employers. My early assumption was that users would have negative views of sponsored posts. I conducted extensive user research to understand how best to release a feature like this to appeal to customers as well as candidates.
🏆 Sponsored listings have 50% higher click through that regular listings
🏆 A new up sell for Haystack
As this project tied in directly with a key business goal, before conducting any research or design work I wanted to ensure I had a strong understanding of the reason for the project and what the business would consider a successful outcome. Haystack was seeking opportunities to increase growth opportunities for existing customers.
Sponsored posts on marketplace platforms is not a new concept, so the first step after understanding the requirements was to look at what’s already out there. This raised some key points to consider:
👉 How do we decide who sees sponsored posts?
👉 How do we differnite sponsored listings?
👉 What language do we use to describe them?
I began sketching some early ideas for ways of presenting sponsored listings. At this stage I still wasn't sure if sponsored posts were something we should shout about, so I explored both loud and minimal design ideas.
A large part of this project was identifying potential risks. It's a common theme for users to disregard 'sponsored' listings. I know I personally skip past the first 3 sponsored Google results because I assume they're less relevant. I interviewd a number of Haystack users to understand how different ways of presenting sponsored listings might impact their perception. I asked users to complete a card sort exercise and review various prototypes with sponsored listing designs. My key learnings were:
👉 Users categorised the language examples into commercial, urgency and relevancy.
👉 Any commercial language reduced a users perceived quality of a role listing.
👉 Urgency based language worked best if a user was very actively seeking a new role.
👉 Relevancy based messaging had the highest percieved quality.
The final choice was 'Haystack Spotlight'. This decision was made as it balanced performance for customers and transparency for users. Users correctly assumed that this language mean't the post had been paid for to increase it's exposure, which was correct, but didn't percieve it to have reduced relevancy as a result.
