How to improve homepage conversion rate? This is what Meituan, JD.com, and Ctrip do

While I was working on this article, heavy snow was falling outside the window. When I was in school, I walked through the campus every winter on the thick snow in Beijing. It has been so long since I last saw this moment. The flying snowflakes often make me think like a spring, so I would like to dedicate this article as a Christmas gift to everyone.

The homepage is the face of an Internet company. It is not only a reflection of its image, but also the entry point for all businesses and the only way for users. As the most important module, its product design and operation will have a key impact on the company's business. The redesign of the homepage is of great importance. It is not only the focus of leadership and business lines, but also the biggest challenge for product managers.

In this article, I will combine my years of practical experience in homepage products and homepage operations in large e-commerce companies to talk about the following aspects and provide some experience references for everyone to play with the homepage:

1. Homepage Mission and Goals
2. Home Product KPI
3. Home Product Design System
4. Example of large e-commerce homepage redesign

I originally wanted to cover the homepage products and operations in one article, but later found that the content was too large, so this article focuses on the homepage products. The next sister article will further discuss home page operations and data monitoring, including home page operation rules, resource position setting, allocation and use, resource position efficiency monitoring, entry traffic capture methods, traffic distribution and control, resource racing mechanism, as well as home page data reports and analysis.

1. First look at the homepage

The first time I realized the huge influence of the homepage was when I was working at Ctrip. Those who are familiar with Ctrip know that the main body of Ctrip’s homepage is a colorful grid. Grids are assigned to various business lines. Whether a business can obtain a homepage grid (first-level entrance), as well as its location and size, reflects the strategic position of the business in Ctrip. The picture below is the Ctrip homepage when I was in charge of the food shopping business.

Ctrip Home Page

It is said that the origin of the colorful grid is that one day the founder Liang Jianzhang dreamed of a colorful house, in which each room had a different color and was very attractive. When he woke up, he asked to change Ctrip's homepage to a colorful grid.

The food business has gained an important entrance on the homepage because food carries Ctrip’s key strategic mission: to fill the two weak links in Ctrip’s five major travel demands of “food, accommodation, transportation, entertainment and shopping” – food and shopping, and to effectively drive the increase in DAU and stickiness through the high-frequency attributes of “food”, thereby feeding back traffic to the core business. This strategic positioning is highly valued by Liang Jianzhang, and as a result, it has stood out among many new businesses and won an important position on the homepage.

Because it has a prominent entrance, the traffic entering from the homepage is very considerable. Of course, the competition for the entrance behind it is also very fierce. Its location and size, even changes in color, can have a significant impact on traffic and therefore have a huge impact on business.

At that time, I was still relatively ignorant about the homepage. Later on in my journey on the Internet, I came to understand more and more deeply the principles and techniques behind the homepage. Let me tell you the story below.

2. The core goal of the homepage

To design a good homepage product or formulate an operation strategy, you must first fully understand the core goals of the homepage.

Goal 1: Traffic distribution

Traffic is the starting point of all businesses of Internet companies. Proper traffic distribution through the homepage and providing reasonable traffic to each business line is usually the most important mission of the homepage.

Most companies have diversified businesses. For example, Ctrip has main businesses such as hotels, air tickets, and travel, as well as more segmented businesses such as homestays, train tickets, and food; JD.com has main businesses such as supermarkets, home appliances, and home furnishings, as well as a large number of segmented businesses; Meituan Dianping has businesses such as food, takeout, and life services.

Meituan Dianping

JD.com

All of these businesses have their own revenue targets and require traffic (i.e. customers), and the main traffic on the app side comes from homepage distribution. So, how to distribute it correctly?

First, determine the business flow target. For example, a company has three businesses A, B, and C, with annual revenue targets of 5 billion, 3 billion, and 2 billion. For simplicity, we assume that all business is completed through the App. The traffic target calculation process for the three services is as follows:

• The first step is to calculate the current conversion rate of A, B, and C (total number of business products sold/total traffic on business product pages).
• The second step is to calculate the average price of items A, B, and C sold.
• The third step is to calculate the traffic share of search and shopping guide based on the traffic sources of the product details page (or POI page).
• The fourth step is to predict the total average daily visits to product pages on the entire site during the target period.
• Step 5. Calculate the proportion of homepage traffic required by A: the total daily average number of single product page visits on the entire site * the proportion of shopping guide traffic * the proportion of A homepage traffic * A conversion rate * the average price of A single product * 365 = 5000M. Calculate B and C in the same way.

For example, the average daily visits to the product pages of the entire site are expected to be 5 million, the shopping guide traffic accounts for 60%, the conversion rate of business A is 20%, and the average price of a single product is 50 yuan, then 5M 60% A traffic share 20% 50*365=5000M, and the traffic share required for business A = 45.7%.

Note : 1. Users’ browsing and orders often span multiple businesses/categories. Therefore, the calculation unit here is not user-order, but single product page traffic-number of single products sold, in order to completely separate each business.

1. In addition to social and SEO channels, there are only two sources of traffic to App product pages: one is through app search, and the other is through the shopping guide column. Home page traffic distribution only affects shopping guide traffic.

2. The single product page mentioned here is the product details page in e-commerce, the POI (stores, attractions, etc.) in OTA or O2O, the content page (articles, short videos, etc.) on the content platform, and so on.

3. For simplicity, it is assumed here that the average price of each product in the target period remains unchanged. If there are changes, you can ask the business line for the price adjustment range as an estimated input.

Through the above calculation, we get the traffic proportion requirements of A, B, and C. But then you may find that the sum of the three does not equal 100%. If it is greater than 100%, it means that the total site traffic cannot meet the revenue target of the business line, and it is necessary to communicate with the relevant departments to either adjust the revenue expectations or find ways to increase traffic or conversion rate. If it is less than 100%, congratulations, it means that some resources can be used as buffer and flexibly allocated as needed.

After determining the traffic share, how to distribute it on the homepage? Traffic is not an object that can be moved around. Behind it are real consumers with clear demands. It is impossible to expect them to click on a certain column and they will do it. Traffic distribution involves very complex product and operational linkages, and also has boundaries and upper limits. Distribution control consists of approximately 30% product and 70% operation (mainly dynamic allocation of resources), which will be further introduced in the home page operation section.

In addition to distributing traffic to business lines on a daily basis, the homepage also bears the responsibility of directing traffic to the main venue, sub-venues and various activities during the promotion period. At this time, it is also necessary to clarify the positioning of each event venue (diverting traffic, selling goods, attracting members) and plan the traffic distribution accordingly.

Goal 2: Browsing path guidance

Behind the massive daily active users of Internet companies are user groups with hugely varying characteristics. Another key goal of the homepage is to lay out a reasonable "shopping" path for users with different styles and demands.

According to shopping purposes, some users are precise users who know exactly what they want to buy, such as a 6-pack of Nestle Stage 3 infant formula; some users are semi-precise users who know what they want to buy but are not specific, such as infant formula; and some users just come to browse casually to see if there is anything good that impresses them.

According to shopping style, some users are price-sensitive users who like to read promotional columns and focus on buying discounted products; some users are quality- or brand-oriented users who like to read boutique shopping guides, buyer recommendations or brand columns; some users are solution-oriented users who look for corresponding products for a certain scenario (such as new mothers, spring outings, and wintering).

Of course, we can also divide them by categories or user demand genes, such as digital geeks, reading enthusiasts, housewives (can be househusbands), new mothers (or new fathers), students, and so on.

All of the above users require differentiated “shopping” paths to achieve a thoughtful shopping process, realize immersive browsing that is highly matched with their interests, and greatly increase the chance of purchase. The homepage, similar to the layout of a shopping mall, is the source of shopping guides and carries the users’ ever-changing “shopping” demands.

Goal 3: Build a corporate image and cater to target customers

Every enterprise has a clear business positioning. For example, some sell high-end luxury goods, some sell cross-border brands, some sell department stores, some sell healthy and fresh food, and some are distribution centers for small commodities.

The homepage is similar to the storefront and must accurately reflect the business positioning so that the corresponding customers will feel comfortable when they enter the homepage and be willing to browse further.

Let’s compare the light luxury e-commerce and supermarket e-commerce apps to see the differences in homepage styles:

Affordable luxury e-commerce vs. supermarket e-commerce

It is not difficult to see that the focus of the homepage of luxury brands is:

1. Brand. For ordinary consumers, the core of luxury goods is the brand, followed by the product, design and style.

2. High definition, large pictures, and blank space. High-end temperament needs to be reflected through these three elements. Relatively speaking, a wide range of products and price discounts are secondary factors.

Supermarket e-commerce, on the other hand, highlights categories and products, emphasizes prices, discounts, and selling points. The interface pursues display efficiency, creating a feeling of a dazzling array of products, and the colors are relatively bright and complex. Because the main consumers of supermarket e-commerce are housewives, they value products, prices and discounts, and their shopping emphasizes demand and efficiency.

Goal 4: Generate direct revenue

The mobile homepage is undoubtedly the page with the largest traffic, and therefore it is also a prime location for generating direct revenue. For example, advertising space, display of popular products, brand cooperation (such as the brand-customized homepage on Super Brand Day, which will charge the brand a considerable fee or require the brand to provide resource support), and directing traffic to an important event are all important means of generating direct revenue.

Home Page of Golden Dragon Fish Super Brand Day No.1 Store

What needs to be balanced here is the relationship between revenue demands and user experience. Of course, this is very difficult, and it is also where the most conflicts occur between business, advertising and other teams and homepage products and operations. It may be necessary to preset the relevant specific resource usage rules in advance.

Goal 5: Conduct critical communications

As a must, communicating with users through the homepage undoubtedly has the highest reach rate. Common means of communication, such as pop-up windows on the homepage (such as new member gift packages, important notifications, rights and interests arrival, etc.), scrolling information bars (such as Taobao headlines, JD Express), the first frame of the top bar, and in-site messages, are all common communication points.

Similarly, how to balance reach and user experience is also a difficult problem. Home page pop-ups are a forced interruption to users. In the past, the experience of many PC websites was largely ruined by pop-up ads. Product managers need to be extra cautious when designing home page pop-ups, and absolutely avoid repeated pop-ups every time the home page is loaded.

Developing a pop-up window on the homepage is not difficult, but it is a challenge to operate the homepage. You have to always resist wave after wave of strong demands for pop-up windows on the homepage and formulate reasonable pop-up rules for this purpose.

3. Home Product KPI

An excellent homepage product is far more than just “looking good”. Product thinking is based on the overall and long-term perspective, has a deep insight into user demands and pain points, and focuses on logic and attribution analysis. Therefore, setting a scientific KPI as a goal is the first step in homepage product design (this is actually the first step in all product design).

The mission of the homepage will be different for different companies. Here I will take the comprehensive e-commerce homepage KPI as an example to illustrate.

KPI 1: Average number of visits to business detail pages per person

Stores want customers to shop around. Assuming that the rate of adding product detail pages is fixed, the more product detail pages users visit, the better the sales will be. Naturally, the average number of business detail page visits per person is the first core indicator of homepage design, which reflects the guidance efficiency of the homepage.

We have found that in addition to the fundamental aspects of product selection, price and promotion, the following factors at the product level have a significant impact on the average number of visits to the business page:

• The personalization level and precision algorithm level of the column
• Reasonable setting of multi-dimensional shopping guide columns
• Shallow exposure of products
• Product layout and display efficiency
• Label system design

The first point is easier to understand. Allowing users to see columns and products that they are more interested in is the key to browsing more. From the diverse faces of each person to the recently emerging immersive browsing (TikTok and Toutiao are the biggest examples, and JD.com and Taobao are also moving towards this style), they are all aimed in this direction.

The second point requires balance. There should not be too many or too few shopping guide columns . Although mindless waterfall flow has become popular in recent years, most users still like to "shop" selectively and like carefully crafted shopping guide columns. The column dimension must be differentiated at the user level and the logic must be clear. For example, promotions can be divided into limited-time, limited-quantity, group-buying, and selected types. It is sufficient to focus on one column for one dimension. If there are too many columns at the same time, users will be lost. Similarly, shopping guides can cover multiple dimensions such as trying new things, following the crowd, curiosity, expert opinions, etc., but there should be at most one column for each dimension, and it is better to have nothing than to have too much.

The third point seems simple, but it is very difficult to put into practice. Good wine needs no bush. If a product can only be seen after jumping to deeper pages, the traffic will be severely attenuated at each level, making it difficult to reach the product. However, placing products directly on the homepage in a residual value column such as “Guess You Like” will achieve certain results, but in practice, the data I have seen on placing products directly on the homepage often shows failure. For example, in the following project, the original channel entrance is as follows:

Do shallow case – old version

In order to make the products shallow and increase the reach of the home page, we tried to salvage the channel's hot products and put them on the home page, and directly access them through the home page. The revised version is as follows:

Do shallow cases – New version

The result was completely unexpected, the business details arrival rate dropped by 0.23%!

The product team revised three versions successively, but all of them failed after online testing. The final conclusion is that if users click directly to the product details when displaying products in the homepage column, the chance of users entering the channel will decrease, and fewer products will be exposed. At the same time, the channel entrance becomes higher, resulting in a decrease in the efficiency of single-screen display, and subsequent columns are pushed deeper, affecting the overall situation. Experimental data shows that the correct way to expose showcase products on the homepage is to direct clicks on the showcase products to the channel page .

Fourth, regarding product layout and display efficiency, test data shows that displaying two items in one row with larger and more beautiful images is not as efficient as displaying three items in one row which is slightly more crowded. The chance of hitting the user when seeing the desired product at first sight is higher than with exquisite product pictures. Don’t ask if there is a test of four in one row, that is beyond my aesthetic bottom line.

Finally, the tag system, which can be written into a long article alone. Simply put, displaying the core selling points of a product through the three major labels of shopping guide, promotion, and attributes is very important for capturing clicks and increasing the reach of product details.

KPI 2: Home Page Click Value

Comprehensive e-commerce platforms usually have a huge number of products, and the columns are often divided into many levels, with the products hidden very deeply. How to efficiently guide users to quickly find products of interest and complete their purchases has become the core appeal of shopping guide products. In layman's terms, the fewer clicks you get to generate more sales, the better. Therefore, “Home Page Click Value” can be defined as a KPI.

• Home page click value = total sales generated by the home page shopping guide column / total number of home page clicks

It is not difficult to imagine that there are three main factors affecting click value:

1. The depth of the path to the product details page

2. The conversion capacity of recommended products

3. Average unit price of goods sold

The first factor has been briefly discussed. Make the products reasonably shallow, but do not affect the display efficiency. At the same time, pages will inevitably be divided into multiple levels, and you must carefully consider how to direct traffic from each page to the next level of pages. For example, the home page displays showcase products, and clicking on them takes you to the channel page rather than the product details page. However, for the sake of user experience, you must ensure that the clicked product appears in a prominent position on the first screen of the channel page.

The latter two factors can be intuitively understood as trying to show users the products they are interested in, and highlighting the selling points through labels, copywriting, etc. At the same time, relatively high-priced items are recommended within the matching range.

However, we must also take a long-term view and look at the life cycle value. For example, a user may prefer electronic products, and the products he browses and purchases are mainly electronic products. It is not difficult to imagine that electronic products will frequently appear in the recommended products on the personalized homepage. However, electronic products are generally low-frequency categories with a long repurchase cycle. If the customer is guided to purchase relatively high-frequency daily necessities or shoes and clothing, and cross-category guidance is carried out, once the conversion is successful, there is a chance to greatly increase his retention possibility, visit frequency and annual consumption amount, thereby achieving higher value enhancement in the long run.

KPI 3: First screen focus rate/visit depth

The mobile homepage of a comprehensive e-commerce website often has many screens. If we observe the traffic attenuation, the first screen is generally 100%, which may decay to 70% on the second screen, and so on, until the "Guess You Like" header, which is usually used to lay the foundation for grabbing residual traffic value, becomes the last screen (on mainstream e-commerce websites such as JD.com, Taobao, and Amazon, the traffic of the last screen of the homepage is usually between 2% and 6%), as shown in the following figure (data is for example).

E-commerce homepage traffic distribution by screen

We will find that a lot of traffic leaves in the process of scrolling down screen by screen (called "bounce"). Therefore, the subsequent column entrance loses the exposure opportunity for the bounced traffic. Naturally, the rate at which traffic decays from screen to screen becomes another KPI for product design.

Because the content on the second screen and beyond will change constantly, and the first screen is usually a fixed column, in practice the "first screen focus rate" is sometimes used as a KPI (that is, what percentage of traffic only reaches the first screen, the smaller the value, the better). Of course, you can also use "visit depth" to see what percentage of users reach which screen, or the average number of screens visited by all users.

Improving the depth of home page visits is a rather complicated matter. Let’s first think about what offline hypermarkets do. They often place high-frequency, urgently needed products such as fresh food in the deepest part of the supermarket. In this way, most people who want to buy fresh food have to go all the way through the entire store, thus increasing the exposure opportunities of all categories.

The online penetration rate of fresh food is very low, and the cost of user jumping in the App is much lower than walking around in the store, so it is obviously impossible to imitate the practices of hypermarkets. So, is it possible to move the online hot-selling channel down? Taking JD.com as an example, the most popular product is flash sales. So, is it possible to move the flash sale down a few screens to extend the user's route to the flash sale?

Definitely not! Because the traffic decays severely from screen to screen, for example, if you put the flash sale on the fifth screen, the traffic of the fifth screen may be improved a lot, but the flash sale traffic will inevitably be greatly reduced, and the overall gain will outweigh the loss. Such core channels should not be used to extend the traffic flow. On the contrary, according to the horse racing principle, the channels with better business results should be placed higher to further improve output.

Currently, there is no particularly good way to significantly increase the reach of subsequent screens. There are some tips that you may like to refer to, such as revealing part of the second screen column at the bottom of the first screen; previewing that there are more exciting things to come; placing the sign-in and lottery column at the end of the screen, etc. You can use your imagination to convey the feeling that "it's more fun below" or "there are benefits below".

KPI 4: Home Page Bounce Rate

Home page bounce rate, that is, leaving the home page without clicking. The intuitive understanding is that after the user comes in, he is not interested in anything and leaves without any clicks.

According to experience, this data is mainly affected by traffic quality rather than homepage product design. For example, a lot of traffic is faked, and there are no real users behind them. Naturally, they will not really browse the site and will naturally "leave" after contributing to the traffic count. Some traffic-boosting tools can record scripts to simulate clicks at specific locations or even more complex operations. In this case, the fake traffic does not bounce on the homepage. But in the end, fake traffic will definitely not place an order.

Another situation is channel diversion with low user relevance. For example, some Internet companies will conduct street marketing to gain users’ download and visit by “requesting them to scan a QR code” or by offering slight incentives. In this case, if the target population does not match, people will come in and see that this is not the "store" they are interested in, and the homepage bounce rate will be very high. The same situation also occurs when pre-installed models or app download channels are not properly matched.

In general, based on experience, the home page bounce rate is less affected by the home page product design. But usually this is an important part of traffic efficiency monitoring. If the bounce rate fluctuates significantly after the homepage product is launched, it is worth further analysis.

Other indicators

The length of time spent on the homepage, the number of clicks on the homepage (reflecting interest), the amount of goods sold on the homepage, etc. are sometimes also used as homepage KPIs. This article does not go into detail.

Looking at the above KPIs, we can see several major demands of the homepage: to allow users to browse more, see more products, and complete purchases with fewer clicks, but also to win users' attention to more columns and generate more clicks . Data in certain dimensions are sometimes inversely proportional to each other, and need to be isolated to consider how to improve them.

4. Homepage comprehensive revision practice

Below, I will introduce the homepage product design process and the entire revision process based on the homepage redesign case that I worked on at No.1 Store.

With the close attention (weekly reports) and full support of the company's CEO, CTO, and CMO, this project has mobilized the entire company to advance, with comprehensive coverage and in-depth participation from almost all departments. The results of the revision were outstanding, and received direct attention and report from Liu Qiangdong.

This is a project from three years ago. Because it involves commercial secrets, it is impossible for such projects to disclose details when they are newly launched. So if you have the opportunity to see a detailed case, it is generally anonymized. But in terms of methodology and process, this project is still a model even today.

Before you start thinking about a product redesign, you need to get input from all sides, including:

• Home page competitive product analysis
• In-depth interviews on current homepage user pain points
• Business Line Home Page Request
  
• In-depth analysis of current homepage efficiency
  
• UED Analysis

1. Competitive product analysis

Competitive product analysis is to:

1) Benchmark your competitors’ homepage styles. Try to match the mainstream and respect the browsing and shopping habits that users have developed. Don't be out of date, but don't be too ahead of the times or different from others.

2) Analyze the main highlights of competing products, learn from and innovate based on your own characteristics; compare them, find out the shortcomings and avoid them.

3) Understand new developments in homepage products and capture cutting-edge trends.

Competitive product analysis can also refer to competitors in other industries to broaden your horizons and learn across industries.

The user research team conducted in-depth research on a large number of competing products. The following are the advantages and disadvantages of competing products in the same industry and across industries:

Competitive product analysis output

Finally, the user research team came to the following five conclusions:

• The general trend is for comprehensive e-commerce to build scenario-based channels . Such as Taobao’s three major scenarios of affordability, quality (Tmall), and features; JD’s three major sections of “love life, enjoy quality, and buy features”.
• The flagship products attract popularity and innovative products emerge in an endless stream . For example, JD.com’s flash sales and Taobao’s good products effectively increase stickiness and efficiently divert traffic; at the same time, JD.com is testing new products such as crowdfunding and Baitiao.
• Super-precision has become a powerful marketing tool for homepages in the era of massive products and users . For example, Taobao column pictures are updated in real time and accurately. Tmall provides efficient push notifications, tailored to each individual and precise traffic diversion by sharing Taobao data backend.
• It has become a mainstream practice for vertical e-commerce to switch large blocks through the homepage tab , and comprehensive e-commerce is trying out multiple homepages to expose more columns.
• The trend of independent customization is gradually emerging . NetEase Cloud Music can adjust the order of sections independently; iQiyi manages channels independently and controls the content in the top area.

Through the above trends, we conclude that, in terms of the overall architecture, the core directions are to build a scenario-based framework, match differentiated user shopping genes, start with hot-selling channels, and lay the foundation with precision; at the same time, dividing the homepage into tab switching areas and supporting independent customization of some content are cutting-edge opportunities.

One reminder is that the research subjects of user research are very broad. There are thousands of apps at home and abroad in various forms, and it is impossible for user research to find data to verify them one by one. The product manager needs to give the direction of the ideas at the beginning of the research, and the user research is mainly to verify and give a conclusion whether it supports or not. This requires a good sense of direction and foresight on the part of the product manager. Of course, there are sometimes surprises.

2. In-depth interviews on user pain points

Another important task of user research is to conduct in-depth user insights and understand the biggest pain points, itch points and excitement points of various types of users.

From qualitative research to quantitative research, the user research team sent out millions of questionnaires (and collected tens of thousands of them), and conducted in-depth interviews with hundreds of users in groups to obtain the current set of homepage questions and create a word cloud based on the frequency of feedback. The results are as follows:

Home page pain point word cloud

In addition, some typical user feedback is excerpted from the user research report as follows:

“Participating in activities is a physical activity” – Ms. Di, V2

“The ad doesn’t attract me, the key information is not clearly written, Tmall will be very clear”, “I don’t seem to see the brand classification, I want to see Dettol, but I can’t see it by brand here” – V0 Miss Fang

“I will look at the bargains, group sales and flash sales, but I don’t know what the difference is. They are all the same to me.” – V3 Mr. Lu

The V here stands for user level, which helps us understand what feedback and pain points users at different levels have.

Finally, the product team sorted out the feedback from user research and distinguished between new and old users. The results are as follows:

Summary of pain points for new and old users

From the conclusion we can see that old users feel that the homepage lacks novelty and they don’t understand me, while new users feel that the homepage lacks characteristics and it is difficult to distinguish the column logic. At the same time, both new and old users feel that there are problems with the promotion guidance, the overall layout of the homepage is unclear, and the browsing efficiency is poor.

3. Business line homepage requirements collection

Objectively speaking, this link is very important, but in fact it is difficult to obtain valuable input.

As a product manager, it is very important to understand the demands of the business line. However, for the homepage, if you understand the needs in an open way, you will basically hear only two demands from the business line:

• I need resources, but I don't have enough resources.
• My resources should be higher and more forward.

Of course, a few people who lack vision will repeatedly demand that others cannot have too much and that their own share must be high.

Therefore, products cannot collect demands in an open manner and dig holes for themselves.

A reference approach is to start with the big boss of the business line and obtain balanced business share requirements from a global perspective as input for home page column settings and resource allocation. On this basis, we plan the columns from a global perspective, set target thresholds for online operations, and confirm with the business lines whether the corresponding columns can be put into operation.

For example, for promotional columns, we can remove the unnecessary elements from the current columns and merge homogeneous columns. Subsequently, based on current business data, recommendations are made on how many times and how long to arrange each type of promotion, what intensity of promotional merchandise needs to be put into place, how much inventory to ensure, and how to select products, so as to achieve the expected traffic and sales results. Finally, determine which columns can be entered on the new homepage. Those that are not doing well will either be moved to the secondary entrance, or simply cancelled or replaced with new columns.

This case received full support from the CEO due to close communication in the early stage, and weekly meetings with four CXOs were arranged, which obtained the full support of the top leadership throughout. Therefore, resource planning and allocation were clarified from top to bottom. On this basis, we obtained full cooperation from all business lines, and conceived and confirmed the operation teams of columns such as Affordable, Quality, and Selected in the subsequent product column settings. In general, the process of obtaining confirmation and support from the business line is relatively smooth.

4. Home page efficiency analysis

Generally speaking, there are two ways to analyze home page efficiency:

The first one is the responsibility of the product side, which collects traffic (or click-through rate) and revenue data for each "slot". These two are core indicators, and you can also add other indicators of importance, such as business page reach rate, bounce rate, member participation rate, core category lead rate, etc.

The second one is usually undertaken by the UED team, which uses an eye tracker to obtain the user's eye movements and operation trajectories, and outputs visual heat maps, gaze trajectory maps, mouse clicks, regional exposure rates, etc. This can fully reflect which part of the homepage attracts users' attention. Of course, this requires very professional equipment and is often outsourced to a third-party company.

The elements of homepage product efficiency analysis are:

• Traffic: reflects the user's interest index in the column, usually calculated by UV. It can also be viewed by click-through rate (CTR, number of users clicking / number of users seeing).
• Revenue: also called GMV, it depends on how much goods this column finally sold. Of course, some columns do not sell goods directly, such as the coupon redemption channel, which can be replaced by corresponding indicators, such as coupon redemption rate, coupon usage rate, content reading rate, social communication initiation rate, etc.
• Product details page reach rate/average number of product details page visits: reflects the column’s efficiency in attracting traffic to products.
• Bounce rate: reflects whether the content and experience of the column will cause users to leave.
• Member participation rate: see how many people are interested in paying members, or the ability to attract users to become paying members.
• Core category guidance rate: In the long run, selling the right products is more important than selling more products. This indicator looks at how much this channel (typically a cross-category channel) helps in selling the right products, or can guide users across categories to become customers of strategic categories.

You can define how to measure the efficiency and contribution of a channel based on your own business needs, and use this as the key basis for determining whether to retain it or what position it should be given in the homepage revision.

In this project, we took the two major indicators of UV and GMV and obtained the following homepage traffic efficiency diagram (specific numbers are hidden):

Home page traffic efficiency chart

A green square in the graph means the channel is performing well, yellow means it's performing just fine, and red means it's not performing at all. This way, we can see at a glance how each channel is performing.

The final homepage analysis is summarized as follows:

• User browsing style
  • About 50% are efficiency-seeking (35% search, 15% category navigation)
  • About 50% of them are just browsing (various channels and venues)
• User Preferences
  • Strong Channel: Group Flash Price – 30%
  • Search: Business and Category Lines – 26%
  • Shopping guides and recommendation columns – 12%
  • Advertising entrance – 10%
• in conclusion
  • Promotional columns performed well, while pictures and advertising floors performed poorly.
  • Strong categories (food, beverages, cleaning, kitchen, bathroom, beauty, maternity and baby) performed well
  • There are inefficient and duplicate entries, and there is a lack of KPI-driven adjustments and horse racing mechanisms

5. UED analysis

The first step in this link is interaction analysis, which focuses on the product's overall information architecture, interface layout, and interaction methods with users. The interactive analysis conclusions of this project include the following links:

1) Layout analysis

Home page layout analysis

• In terms of homepage module division, Tmall and JD.com integrate various businesses into corresponding channels according to relevance. The homepage content is rich and orderly, easy to understand for users, and also convenient for the visual team to design visual elements in a targeted manner.
• Compared with Tmall's 40 entrances and JD.com's 44 entrances, Yihaodian has only 28 entrances, but its aggregation method is chaotic and disordered. The homepage modules are divided partly by channel dimensions and partly by business dimensions. The layout is not arranged from the user's perspective, causing users to "not understand" or "not find". It is also difficult to handle the overall visual presentation, and there is a serious sense of fragmentation.

Simply put, orderliness needs to be improved.

2) Raster analysis

The grid system uses a regular grid to guide and standardize the layout. The advantages are:

1. Make the information presentation on the page more beautiful and easy to read, and improve usability;

2. At the front-end implementation level, the page can be made more standardized and flexible, making it easier to implement modularization

Home Grid Analysis

The raster analysis conclusions given by the interactive team are:

• [JD.com] Use 4-column grid system modules to unify into 2 sizes: 1 unit, 2 units, 4 units (full column)
• [Tmall] Use 12-column grid system modules to unify into 3 sizes: 3 units, 4 units, 6 units, 12 units (full column)
• [Yihaodian] Part of the 3-column grid system is used, with modules occupying 1 unit, 2 units, and 3 units (full column). Some modules are independent of the grid system.

Simply put, the current homepage grid is rough, and many columns are not aligned with the grid.

The next step is visual analysis. It mainly focuses on the overall visual effects, use of colors and other aspects.

3) Visual analysis

Visual effects analysis material

The preset direction is to make the homepage exquisite and improve the visual effect. The visual team selected Liangcang (deliberately not benchmarking JD.com and Taobao) as the benchmarking object with outstanding performance in this aspect, and gave the following conclusions:

• The homepage carousel images and product images convey the fastest and most intuitive visual experience to users, and directly reflect the temperament and positioning of the product. The first impression I got from my store’s app was that of a “grocery store”, messy and boring. There are many products but the quality is not high, and the red prices fill the entire screen, which is overwhelming and intrusive. It fails to impress users and they have no desire to buy.
• Liangcang: Emphasis on "selection" and "design aesthetics". The product selection emphasizes design and technology, and does not use a large number of push heads that would appear cluttered. The simple and bright colors in the carousel highlight the theme, eliminating the tacky bright red and green. There aren’t too many fancy decorations on the text, which enhances the quality of the product itself.
• No.1 Store: The product images are rough and the carousel images are a bit tacky. The color scheme has nothing to do with the product. The copywriting and price information are too large and too much, the layout is messy, and various red labels are abrupt and interfere with the vision. It is recommended to reduce and control the number of words in the copy. Increase the use of scenario-based pictures to enhance the sense of quality and create a shopping environment. The modular floors are more distinct, and the rhythm of the floors should be varied. Avoid having three floors in a row, as this can easily cause visual fatigue and boredom.

4) Color analysis

Most e-commerce brands have similar colors. If you want to give users a sense of freshness and uniqueness among many similar apps, you can only use different designs in local locations such as colors and icons. For example, slightly change the icon style, use micro-simulation in appropriate places, etc., to add some small creativity.

Color analysis materials

The following is the color analysis output, and three relatively distinctive apps were selected for comparison.

• The border of the [Want to Go] banner simulates the thickness of magazine paper, and the special font layout of the title text increases the taste of quality design and sets off the style of the product.
• The realistic food in the [Ele.me] icon enhances the intuitive temptation, and the large area of ​​blue enhances the brand impression
• The [Enjoy] icon uses a pure black line to convey a sense of high-end luxury. The product pictures are exquisite, and the default defective pictures are also designed with a sense of quality, like high-end wrapping paper, not just a simple gray with a logo.

5) Big promotion customization

Double 11, 618, Black Friday, and various e-commerce festivals, including Super Brand Day, are the time for e-commerce design teams to show their talents, allowing consumers to break away from the usual familiar interfaces and see the lively, festive and innovative costumes in a refreshing way. Compared with the main promotion venue which focuses more on promotional activities, product display efficiency, and distribution in sub-venues, the homepage is a better stage to showcase creativity.

In the comparison of customization for this project's big promotion, No.1 Store's design won.

Big promotion customization comparison

Due to progress requirements, no testing of visual heat maps and gaze trajectory maps was arranged for this revision. However, if time and funds permit, you can cooperate with a third-party organization with professional equipment to gain an in-depth understanding of the user's eye trajectory and focus on the current homepage, so as to better understand the user's browsing characteristics and interests.

The figure below is an analysis of the homepage made by Amazon's visual team. We can see that the red area is the area where users pay the most attention. The redder it is, the more attention it pays. Then the attention decreases from yellow to green to white. At the same time, the user's eye movement sequence can also be obtained. 1, 2, 3, 4 in the rightmost picture are the user's line of sight movement trajectory. Through such analysis, it is easier for us to determine what tends to attract users’ attention and thus find the focus of the design.

Visual heatmap and trajectory map

At this point, competitor analysis, in-depth user research, business line needs, product analysis, and UED analysis are all completed, the input collection phase ends, and the new homepage design phase begins.

6. Mobile Mood Board

This professional research, conducted by the visual team, aims to understand consumers’ emotional reactions when browsing shopping on the app, and then determine the main color and style of the new homepage, convey and highlight the product personality and brand image, and influence the brand character and consumption patterns in the user’s subconscious mind.

The research process of the emotional version is as follows:

Emotional board research process

The steps and output are as follows:

1) According to the company’s brand image positioning, three native keywords were selected: family, international, and affordable ; and based on user interviews, high-frequency words that reflect impressions and appeals were sorted out, and an easily confused negative word was added to obtain the derived positioning words: convenient, affordable, honest, high-quality, enthusiastic, rich, and cheap (negative word).

2) Interpret the visual, mood, and material mapping corresponding to each positioning word, and define the color and scene. Take "family" as an example:

• Visual mapping: soft lighting, softness, wooden structure;
• Mood mapping: 1. Warmth; 2. Tenderness; 3. Companionship;
• Materialized mapping: 1. Carpet, fireplace, bed; 2. Parents, children; 3. Pets;
• Color: Warm, soft
  • Orange - Lights, skin, wood;
  • High brightness and low purity - harmonious, light and comfortable;
• Scene: Family sitting together watching TV, traveling together;

3) Through the above interpretations, find a large number of pictures that can represent positioning words. Taking "family" as an example, the visual team found hundreds of pictures that can represent the visual, emotional and material mapping of "family" based on the above descriptive words:

Blur all images and extract the main colors:

4) Finally, determine the color scheme based on the feeling that the homepage product hopes to convey: “simple, youthful, and available anytime, anywhere.” For example, the color palette for “Simple” is as follows:

At this point, the color matching and style determination that reflects the business positioning and the demands of the revised product have become the main design basis for designers.

7. New homepage KPI selection

The core goal of this revision is to improve the efficiency and experience of homepage guidance, reorganize and aggregate the shopping guide columns in a scenario-based manner, and provide different styles of users with their own demand-carrying areas. Therefore, click value, average number of clicks per person, first-screen focus rate, and bounce rate are selected as the four core indicators.

The target value is set according to the current actual situation. According to the comparison of competitor data, the biggest gap is in the number of clicks per person, while the current bounce rate has a greater advantage. Therefore, based on the gap and the potential improvement effect corresponding to the product idea, a 5% to 20% improvement target was set, as follows.

Home page redesign KPI

8. Brainstorming on homepage design

The product team brainstormed based on all the outputs of the preliminary preparations and product goals, and proposed the following framework ideas:

• The floors are divided into thematic dimensions, such as good stores, themes, stores, lists, etc., and the channels provide interspersed recommendations.
  • Comment: This idea is in line with the mainstream, but the plan is slightly conservative.
• Arrange flash sale products vertically to bring traffic downward, or move the hot-selling channel downward and provide prompts on the first screen.
  • Comment: This idea is a bit out-of-the-box and risky. It may lead to significant discounts on sales of popular channels, thus affecting overall revenue.
• Set tabs at the top according to the scenario: such as shopping guide, activities, etc.
  • Comment: This idea is very innovative and radical. In essence, it is to realize multiple home pages for e-commerce products. The biggest concern is that there will be no traffic in the subsequent tabs.
• The content is placed in the front, exposed at a shallow level, and displayed through channels.
  • Comment: The advantage of this idea is that it provides traffic for more core content, but the disadvantage is that it will cause the homepage to be too long, and the columns in the middle and later parts of the list will not be exposed.

After repeated discussions and demonstrations, we considered two plans, one conservative and one radical, for the leadership to decide. The first point mentioned above is the direction of a safe product solution and is the main one; the second point is abandoned; the third point is a radical solution and is used as an alternative; and the fourth point is more suitable for displaying partial content on the homepage that users are interested in. Based on this consideration, a bold innovation is made: a purely customized homepage is provided to users as the second homepage.

9. Home page design

1) Main plan (safe version)

The main promotion plan reorganized almost all columns based on the original framework. The header area was then laid out according to the scenario, the homepage resource columns were reorganized and adjusted, a lot of micro-innovations were made locally, and the company's strategy and business positioning were visually re-matched to solve the core pain points reported by users.

The key points of the plan are as follows:

This revision also redesigned the search page to guide the precise traffic along the search path and create new business opportunities. Among them, "Everyone is looking for" guides search traffic to target products or activities through the herd mentality, while using "I can't remember what to look for" to capture users who enter the search but have a "browsing" mentality or curiosity.

Search page design

2) Second homepage and customized homepage

Although the homepage can be different for different people, the main framework is usually fixed. With the enrichment of shopping guide columns and the continuous increase of new columns, the home page is getting longer and longer, and users' limited time and attention are seriously distracted and even lost. Since there are a lot of columns that are of no interest to everyone, it is not difficult to think of: let the homepage be completely customized by the user!

In this redesign, we launched a second homepage that is fully customizable by users, as shown below:

It can be seen that the design sets the skin (changeable) by regional characteristics, and all columns can be selected, added, reduced, and sorted by users through the channel pool (the initial value is set by the user's browsing history). At the same time, each channel provides a homepage card to partially expand the hook content of the column.

In addition, the second homepage can also support skin replacement. Here are several versions of the default skins:

The second home page can replace the skin

After this bold homepage innovation went online, the data we saw showed that the traffic coming in from the traditional homepage accounted for a small proportion, but the traffic that came in had a high rate of repeat visits, and the conversion efficiency was significantly improved during repeat visits. This proves that

1. Users tend to be "lazy", so the habit of using new products needs to be developed gradually.
2. The customized homepage only displays the channels that users like, which is highly efficient in guiding users.
3. Marketing resources have basically disappeared. This is its charm, but it also determines that it cannot ultimately replace the first homepage. After all, the business line needs to place advertisements and promote activities.

Another innovative practice is that the UED team developed an H5 version of a customizable homepage, in which the carousel images can be replaced with self-selected photos, the icon text can be customized by the user, and the homepage is disseminated through WeChat. This version was launched on Valentine's Day, focusing on confession scenes, combining shopping with love, which is lively and interesting.

H5 customized homepage

3) Alternative plan (radical version)

This homepage redesign hopes to provide differentiated browsing paths for users with different styles. In the first version of the safe plan, we still retained a large number of columns that meet the preferences of various users, but it also resulted in a longer homepage. A radical approach is to try multiple home pages simultaneously, allowing users to switch according to their browsing preferences.

The homepage must display core marketing content and core fixed columns. In addition, the users who browse the homepage can be divided into casual, semi-precise, and activity-oriented types. For this purpose, three sub-homepages, "Channel", "Category", and "Activity", are set up to provide differentiated shopping guide paths.

The design is as follows:

Multiple homepage design

Because the content of each homepage is split, the conditions for partially expanding the homepage of each column are met, allowing the top secondary content to be shallowly exposed, better capturing traffic and even completing conversions directly through the homepage. In addition, the activity waterfall flow on the "Activities" homepage allows users who like to participate in activities to quickly browse the activity pool, greatly improving the efficiency of "shopping".

As a result of the final selection, the leadership unsurprisingly chose the safe option.

10. Summary of pain point solutions and innovation points

Finally, based on the previous pain point research, let’s take a look at how the new version of the homepage covers and solves the pain points.

New homepage pain point solutions and innovations

From the above figure, we can see that all pain points are covered in the solution. At the same time, the revised solution also has four innovative points:

1. Customize the home page (second home page). This is an innovative design in the e-commerce industry. Through customized columns, localized operations and skin replacement design, it creates a homepage that best suits users.

2. Floating carousel. This design mainly solves the problem that when the overall homepage is customized (such as Super Brand Day), the second frame and subsequent pictures of the carousel may be inconsistent with the "hat" and "clothes" on the first screen. By making the carousel visually separated into layers through suspension, it is not only beautiful but also reduces the problem of mismatch between the top and the bottom.

3. Channel dynamic content homepage display. Different activities, products, and contents are salvaged based on the current user preferences and displayed on the homepage, with completely dynamic content. This breaks through the industry's way of displaying dynamic images and products for fixed content.

4. Customized search pages aggregate multiple dimensions to guide search traffic, breaking through the two main directions of "search history" and "hot searches" on conventional search pages, increasing revenue resources and business guidance, and also enhancing the fun of search.

11. Data performance of the new homepage

After the new homepage went online, the data performed well. AB testing shows:

• The click value increased by about 21%.
• The average number of clicks per person increased by 27%.
• The first screen focus rate declined in the initial stage and then rebounded, eventually approaching the original data. Analysis shows that a large number of users are fresh about the new homepage, and their "browsing" behavior increases significantly in the initial stage, but after the novelty stage, they will still focus on their favorite channels.
• There was no significant change in the bounce rate. This shows that the homepage design is not the biggest factor affecting the bounce rate. Unless there is a major design error.

5. Home page practical summary

Readers who have the patience to read this far must be colleagues who are particularly interested in learning in depth the design concepts and methods of the homepage. Finally, let me make a brief summary here.

1. The homepage is the key to traffic distribution. It determines the opportunities for each business line within the company to obtain traffic and conversions. It is the most important module of Internet products, and it can even be said that there is no other. However, traffic distribution is an extremely complex topic. I will elaborate on my practical methods and experience in the homepage operation section.

2. The homepage carries the mission of guiding users to browse and purchase, establishes and reflects the company's brand image, creates direct revenue, and is also the most important communication point. There are a lot of balance points in these aspects. How to grasp the experience and create maximum overall benefits is an important issue for product managers.

3. To make a good homepage, you must first clearly identify which KPIs to focus on and design for. Among them, average business page reach/visits per capita, click value, number of clicks, dwell time, browsing depth, bounce rate, and other aspects to improve traffic efficiency can all be used as KPIs.

4. In the homepage product design and revision, competitive analysis, user pain point analysis, business needs analysis, product efficiency analysis, and UED analysis are all important sources of input. All designs need strong basis. Try to avoid “I like it” or “I think it looks good”. Product managers can’t do anything about “the boss likes it”.

5. It is necessary to follow up on the final data, release it in phases, and carefully verify the effectiveness of all aspects. At the same time, avoid changes that are too drastic. On the other hand, users may feel refreshed, but they may also be left confused. We need to respect the habits that users have already developed and avoid being too innovative. At the same time, we should try to ensure backward compatibility in design to reduce users' learning costs.