Paddy Power - Affiliate Microsite

Background to the Project

The Affiliate Microsite is a pre-merger product aimed at affiliates who do marketing on behalf of Paddy Power. On average, we have between 800/900 new affiliates sign up each year and over 10,000 existing affiliates.

The Problem

In terms of new sign ups, the business was very happy with the numbers they were signing up, however an issue that kept happening was that potential affiliates were getting in contact with customer support as they didn’t understand exactly what they would get by signing up.

What I Did

Facilitated Workshops, Journey Mapping, Card Sort, Competitor Analysis, Wireframing.

The Project Team

The team for this project consisted of myself as UX, a UI Designer in Porto, a Product Owner in Dublin and Developer in Romania. 

Kick Off Workshop and Existing Product review

At the discovery workshop, I laid all the existing screens on Miro and as a group we reviewed each of them.

We came to agree on a few points. 

  • The site doesn’t break down to the user what the benefits to signing up are.

  • It felt as if we expected users to find information in the FAQ’s.

  • It’s confusing for internal staff, so how would our users understand it

  • There’s no natural flow to it

Please Note: The login/sign up pages are owned by a 3rd party and as such couldn’t be redesigned so those pages weren’t look at.

Next Steps

Firstly, I felt that as this site is essentially for acquisition, it needed to have a sense of a sales funnel where we could drip feed the user’s information that would not only be informative but would also whet their appetite to sign up. 

Unfortunately, although the data told us that most traffic was going to FAQ’s, we didn’t have the data as to which questions they were looking at.

FAQ’s Card Sort

The FAQs had over 70 questions going from Marketing support to information on IBAN numbers, so I felt a sensible starting point would be to do a thorough card sort. I requested the support of 10 internal colleagues who I sent the card sort excel document for them to complete 

Once I had the 10 different documents, and adding in my own sort, I created a heat map to see where the common links were.

User Journey Map

Alongside the card sort, I created some example user journey maps for how new users would feel when they landed on the current site and how the ideal journey would be for the new site.

I looked to work out where suitable touchpoints would be to offer the ability to sign up, but with us having given them enough information that it didn’t feel pushy 

Competitor Analysis

I also looked at our competitors. Every gambling company have these affiliate sites so it was interesting to compare our existing service to them, and then how I foresaw our future offering.

Recommendations 

Taking on board all the information i had gathered up to this point, I came up with 3 key recommendations, they were:

Create pillars of benefits for the user to understand why they should sign up with us

Give clear information within these pillars as to remove the need for a long list of FAQ’s

Look at taking over the “Sign Up”/”My Account” from the 3rd parties so we can incorporate some of the other FAQ’s in more relevant locations

I essentially saw the affiliate site working as a sales filter, by giving the users information ahead of time and in a relevant place that would make sense, we could minimise any need for them to contact customer support, as well as giving the site a redesign.

Unfortunately, my recommendation about taking back control of the “Sign Up”/”My Account” from the 3rdparties wasn’t deemed worthwhile from a financial consideration.

My next steps were to start to take everything I had learned and turn it into some tangible wireframes

Wireframes

There were certain hygiene factors that I needed to keep in for compliance. I initially wanted to remove the FAQ section completely as it felt like a cop out to hide behind, but we were informed by legal that our affiliates must be able to see these. We also needed to have links to the privacy and cookie policies and a way for customers to contact us before they signed in.

I came up with 2 variants but both following along the same sales funnel process.

Variant 1 (V1)

On V1, the landing page essentially works as the main navigation by linking out to the pillars on separate pages

The users can go through the funnel, learning about the benefits and key selling points whilst also being reminded to join now on each page 

On V2, again the landing page essentially works as the main navigation but for this version I went for a single page design where the user could scroll down themselves or use the navigation.

The idea is to give users bits of information to help them make an informed decisions rather than making them go looking for it.

The top navigation works as a sticky so no matter where the user is, they can navigate to the other sections, join now or login.

For conversion rates, it was important that a ‘Join’ CTA was always visible 

Project Conclusion

I really enjoyed this project even though the registration and account sections haven’t been redesigned. The solution the business progressed with was v2.

You can see the live page here

We have seen a 15% decrease in customer support contacts from affiliates which was the fundamental driver for the redesign, but also an increase of 2% for new sign ups, so this project has been well received from the business

Tools I Used

Miro (Kick Off Workshop)

Excel (Journey Mapping / Competitor Analysis / Card Sort)

Figma (Wireframing)