I worked in-house at The Knot for 2 years where I led product design strategy for their Registry platform. I worked closely with product and engineering to identify and execute a sound product strategy that met user’s needs and added value to their wedding registry journey, worked within our technical constraints, and exceeded our business goals and KPIs.
I conducted a full audit of The Knot’s existing registry, identifying major usability issues, key drop off points, and outdated UI styles.
After developing a solid understanding of the registry landscape, I sought to learn more about the couples using The Knot’s registry. What are their pain points? What are their registry needs? How are they currently using The Knot’s registry? I dug deep into analytics, and interviewed many couples to learn more about their behaviors.
Armed with this research, I gathered XO Group’s major Registry stakeholders to participate in a 5-day design sprint to redefine our product strategy.
During our collaborative team sessions, we outlined a couple’s registry user journey outside of the limitations of our product. We paired each stage of their journey with the user’s goal, as well as what they were doing, thinking, and feeling.
From low to medium fidelity, I blocked out how the experience was organized, what it would look like, and how it would behave.
The blank state is intended to catch couples earlier in the funnel, before they’ve started their registry, to let them know about The Knot’s registry product and show them the value we can deliver.
KPI: Increase registry creation rate
Our registry creation goal has surpassed our quarterly projections, and we attribute that increased conversion to our design efforts.
Couples with registries at multiple stores expressed pain points in keeping track of all of their gifts, communicating a need for an aggregated birds eye view of their registry status. We introduced a registry dashboard where couples could not only view all the gifts on their registry across multiple stores, but they could get a quick snapshot of their registry’s “health.” They can understand at a glance whether they need to add more gifts, or whether a certain price range has been sold out.
(Left): Registry blank state (Right): Active Registry management tool
We incorporated registry into The Knot’s iOS and Android apps in order to drive more product adoption. Our user research indicated that 60% of couples manage their registries on their mobile phones, so designing for this use case was imperative to our strategy.
Cash registries have been growing in popularity over the past few years, and most of The Knot’s main competitors were already offering this feature. We built our own cash registry product called The Newlywed Fund that allows couples to add cash funds to their registry for anything from a honeymoon to new appliances to a down payment on a new home.
I designed a series of onboarding modals to explain the nuances of the Newylwed Fund product to couples when they arrived on the page for the first time.