Local Deals on Nextdoor
Building a hyperlocal ad platform for small businesses
TIMELINE
15 months
PLATFORM
Web, iOS & Android
TYPE
Consumer
HIGHLIGHTS
Interaction Design, 0 to 1 Product Development
Challenge
Nextdoor is the social network for neighborhoods. For years, the platform banned all commercial content from users due to risks of spam and abuse. This blanket restriction affected all businesses from not just retailers, restaurants and contractors but also dog walkers, music teachers or any individual attempting to promote their services to the community. Our objective was to develop this clear use case into a marketplace that added value to neighborhood newsfeeds as well as being the company’s first attempt to prove out self service advertising.
Approach
We had years of data from flagged commercial posts, which gave us valuable insights into how we can develop product market fit. We built out a rapid bare-bones prototype, and launched in one market in Austin, Texas to quickly learn from businesses and observe reactions from neighbors. From this, I designed a suite of content management and ad targeting tools for SMBs, as well as a discovery and redemption feedback loop for users.
Impact
After progressively expanding to larger markets in 2019, we eventually launched in the US and also select countries in the EU where Nextdoor was also available. In about a year, we saw explosive revenue growth of over $3M+ as Local Deals clearly served a need that users have asked for years.
If you’d like to learn more about this case study, please get in touch!
Neighbor Experience
Experience for members comprises of discovery, redemption and reengagement. Members can find deals in the newsfeed, search and on business pages. They can then save it for later and redeem it in-person or online. Key considerations involved creating a powerful feedback loop, personalization and contextual location based notifications.
The first version of our redemption experience was really tailored for restaurants and physical retail stores. In our paid pilot we saw significant interest from home services categories where the redemption might not happen in a brick and mortar location and may not have a discount code. I worked on an updated experience that also optimized for these low frequency but high value transactions.
Carousel View — Flexible way to merchandize multiple deals in one Newsfeed slot
Detail View — A large redemption code and a call to action to mention ‘Nextdoor’ is a reaction to businesses indexing on ‘word of mouth’ as a metric of ad effectiveness
BUSINESS EXPERIENCE
We learnt through on site observation and data analysis that smaller merchants have very little time to make high quality creative. We saw frequent typos, low resolution images or basic punctuation mistakes. I proposed to my team an inline contextual guidance system that captured and corrected mistakes in real time. Key considerations included automating manual workflows, delivering meaningful analytics and supporting businesses in creating engaging content.
Neighborhood level targeting is an unique selling point of Local Deals. After several iterations, I came to a radius-based design that is simple to understand and flexible. More importantly it enabled us to customize a default order size based on the type of business. This new design directly resulted in a 2.5x increase in our average order value.
Contextual Guidance — Improved content quality and reduced user error
Audience Targeting — A slider based design that controls a radius which enabled fast, efficient and flexible targeting that is performant on web and on mobile
NEXT PROJECT
Automated Provisioning
Streamlining the complex and manual workflow of getting customers access to satellite imagery