Slickdeals, if you haven't heard of it, is the largest community-driven Deal site on the web.  It is built on user participation:  users submit great deals they find on the web, and the audience votes for the best ones.  The very top deals make it to the Slickdeals "Frontpage" - essentially a daily feed with engagement similar to any social media property.  This metric is known as the DAU/MAU ratio:  how many of your monthly active users come to the site every day.  Slickdeals was at around 35% at the time I worked there, which is off the charts.  It is a highly engaging way of finding great deals, with a loyal community of rabid followers. 

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The type of buying behavior that Slickdeals facilitates is Opportunistic Buying.  I check out the deals of the day, and if I see something just too good to be true, I buy it.  I am not looking for anything in particular, I just discover an opportunity I cannot pass up and pull the trigger because the deal is just too good to be true.  The joke at Slickdeals was always that everyone had a set of kitchen knives they didn't really need because of that "one amazing deal" - the opportunistic purchase. 

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When I worked at Slickdeals, our primary task was to migrate a desktop web experience to a mobile app and mobile web experience.  We were in the thick of organic consumer mobile migration, and on top of it Google was releasing their "mobile friendly" algorithm that would penalize any site that was not mobile friendly, which Slickdeals was not.  I was brought on board to optimize the mobile experience before these updates occurred. 

 

A big part of the endeavor was determining what components of the more complex desktop functionality we wanted to migrate to mobile, and in what order.  To make this decision we did a deep dive into how consumers were using the desktop version of the site.  

 

What we discovered was that the most savvy users - powerusers (around 5% of the base, responsible for 20% of the revenue) were using a "buried" feature most users didn't know about.  It was something called a "Deal Alert" and it involved a lot of complexity - essentially setting up an automated script that looked each day for deals matching certain criteria.  Powerusers loved deal alerts - indeed it was the way they preferred to use the product - and we determined it was something we could surface to the larger audience.  

 

To do this, we needed to greatly simplify the user experience around setting a Deal Alert.  Rather than letting the user set dozens of variables, we identified the top deal alerts and created "one tap" deal alerts that could be set instantly.  We retained the advanced settings, but made them just that - advanced - if a user wanted to go in and fine tune the nuances of the deal alert settings they could.  

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Deal Alerts were instrumental in increasing revenue for Slickdeals 10% a year from 2018 to 2022.  It facilitated a new kind of purchasing behavior:  Intent-Driven Purchases.  Prior to Deal Alerts, Slickdeals was a place folks would go to Discover new deals, now it was a place to also purchase the item you were willing to wait for.  Not surprisingly, these tended to be higher ticket items:  an HDTV, a digital camera - items that warranted waiting for that great deal to come along.  

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By understanding Poweruser behavior, simplifying a complex feature and bringing it front and center to users, Slickdeals was transformed into a site with multiiple avenues for saving money on purchases.  The migration to a mobile experience provided a great opportunity to redesign and optimize features for larger audience consumption.

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