In 2009, The Groop helped re-design an online service, called Savings.com, and it’s going bonkers! The business is brilliant. It finds coupons and discounts you can use for hundreds of products you probably already buy. No harm in taking five minutes to find a 20% discount off your next purchase, is there? Simply click on a coupon, get the code and be taken directly to the retailers commerce site to make your purchase. It’s that easy…

Savings.com site new feature, "UX'ed" by Charles Erdman

The Work

As part of their effort to continue building and launching features, I helped “architect” a new area of the site called “Answers.” This new service was a concept the company thought would deepen users’ relationship with the core service by engaging the emerging community in a new activity- becoming shopping guides. Savings.com has an active community of power users who scour the web looking for deals and coupons they can share on the site. “Answers” generates solutions or opinions to any question revolving around the researching and purchasing of products, services or merchandise.

I crafted the User Experience after careful examination of other Answer sites that have emerged on the web over the last year. Creating a forum for questions and answers is now a valued offering for many sites, not just Savings.com. It decreases call service volume and deepens the relationship with the brand. My workflow involved competitive research; feature inventories; whiteboard sketching of initial concepts and interaction patterns, before building finished wireframes.

UX process included white boarding an annotated wires by Charles Erdman.

Reference Sites

Here is a list of the sites I reviewed in order to architect an experience that was inline, and possible superior, within the context of Savings.com. Take a look and see what you think. By the way, Get Satisfaction is a Q/A site you can actually port and skin to your own company website. Pretty cool if any of you need it for your biz…

Mahalo.com
Yahoo Answers
Get Satisfaction
Deals.Woot
Aardvark

Client Site: www.savings.com
Partner’s Site: www.thegroop.net

P.S. I’m currently helping a team build the User Experience for the new MySpace re-design and re-brand, which will launch in October. Be on the look out for my next post to promote the upcoming releases of Focus (a UCLA and Dept. of Defense program), Quixote / Smashbox (Los Angeles production company) and JCPenney Rewards.