Increasing Revenue across Mashable Shopping Articles with User-Centered Editorial Practices

Mashable’s commerce and product teams needed a scalable way to improve performance across shopping content, a key revenue driver during the holiday season.

This was a milestone project for Mashable, marking the first deep dive into user behavior combining moderated research, historical analyses, and SEO insights guiding UX design and editorial content strategy.

I’m proud to say that comprehensive planning and consistent coordination led us to successfully deliver across all business and UX priorities.

Imagine fall has arrived and Black Friday is approaching.

We were running out of time to learn from the current Mashable shopping experience and improve our designs and editorial practices before people began shopping for the holidays.

My Role

I developed the end-to-end research approach, advising our research vendor on a plan to deliver actionable insights that informed both short-term optimizations and long-term strategy for Mashable shopping content.

Partnering with the Product Manager, we coordinated across editorial, SEO, UX design, and engineering teams to gather and share data that informed our decisions.

Priorities

Leadership emphasized:

Improving measurable outcomes like conversions, RPM, and commissions.
Delivering actionable, research-backed insights in time for Black Friday.
Ensuring a scalable, collaborative approach across teams within tight deadlines.

My UXR Operations priorities were:

Expanding UX research operations across the Ziff Davis portfolio.
Proving the value of UX research to teams that were initially unfamiliar and hesitant.
Providing insights that editors could take action on immediately, in a format they’re familiar with.

Research Impact

The research conducted for the Helios Dealios project had a direct and measurable impact on Mashable’s deal content strategy and overall performance during the 2021 holiday season:

Involving a trusted, e-commerce research vendor gave a greater appearance of third-party neutrality, which was helpful when first introducing wary Mashable teams to the idea of qualitative research-informed experience design.

This impact highlights the power of aligning research insights with business priorities to deliver meaningful outcomes for both users and the organization

Goals, Assumptions, & Questions

User Experience Goal
Optimize Mashable’s content strategy to fit seamlessly into our users’ natural shopping behavior, establish trust, and support their deal-hunting journey.
Product & Business Goal
Improve the discoverability, engagement, and conversion rates of Mashable shopping content during the high-stakes Black Friday and Cyber Week periods.
We hypothesized that:
1. Users prefer curated lists of deals over single-deal pages.
2. Scannable, structured information increases engagement.
3. Navigation and discoverability challenges hinder user satisfaction.
We sought to answer:
1. What deal-seeking behaviors do users naturally exhibit?
2. What information hierarchy best supports quick purchasing decisions?
3. How can navigation and content discoverability be improved to drive engagement?
August 2021
Gathered requirements and co-led project kickoff; partnered with UXR vendor to help with participant recruitment.
September 2021
Co-moderated interviews with the vendor; shared supporting data analysis alongside the vendor’s insights and recommendations the following week.
October 2021
Launched a research-informed content strategy to capture Black Friday traffic; began testing UX design and editorial updates.
November 2021
Optimized designs, improved discoverability of shopping content, and used real-time analytics to guide iterative improvements on content strategy.
December 2021
Evaluated project success based on conversions, RPM, and user engagement; documented lessons learned for future content scaling.

Methods, Tools, & Ownership

In-house Research Owned

Communicated our research goals to the vendor and collaborated on methodology
Consulted on participant selection criteria and was responsible for final selection
Developed the initial research plan and interview script to elicit the participant experiences we wanted to understand better
Continued working with product teams to integrate insights and recommendations into our body of knowledge on user behavior
WIN: Before this project, the product and editorial teams were hesitant to lean so heavily on qualitative research, so I made sure to triangulate what we learned from observation with behavioral user data from the same shopping templates we tested. I also brought our vendor up to speed on the organizational hesitancy, emphasizing that this project has a dual goal of UX research earning the trust of the entire organization. I worked closely with the vendor to ensure the involvement of stakeholders during interviews and immediately after to reflect on what they observed.

Research Vendor Owned

Championed our UX, business, and cultural goals throughout the project
Coordinated participant vetting and recruitment
Carried out participant interviews

coordinated participant vetting and recruitment

vendor delivered their observations and recommendations

Participants

Tech-savvy individuals aged 24–44.
Mobile-first shoppers who regularly compare deals online.
Value-conscious users who prioritize clear and trustworthy deal information.

Research Tools

Add your pricing strategy. Be sure to include important details like value, length of service, and why it’s unique.

Research Artifacts & Observations

It’s time for picturesssssss! JK - you can and should add photos to any of the sections above if you think it will add to the content. That might be especially helpful under the “context” section above. I find that’s more useful for UX design portfolios vs. research, but this is a great place to add photos of the research methods and synthesis. I gathered screenshots of my work and put them all in one doc using Canva, then added the numbers and arrows.

What We Did

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What We Learned

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User Stories

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Description of the type of user this quote is from.
Silver

What should we know about the services you provide? Better descriptions result in more sales.
Gold

What should we know about the services you provide? Better descriptions result in more sales.
Platinum

What should we know about the services you provide? Better descriptions result in more sales.

Putting Insights Into Action: Before & After

Build strong stakeholder relationships to research by involving them in the research process to share their niche product expertise and gain exposure hours to people using their product.

Tested Article Summary

It all begins with an idea. Maybe you want to launch a business. Maybe you want to turn a hobby into something more.

Redesigned Article Summary

Cleaned up the visual appearance of the article summary section, to make the content people came there for easier to navigate and scan: Added photos, Get Deal buttons,

Iterations & Testing

Tested Product Deal

It all begins with an idea. Maybe you want to launch a business. Maybe you want to turn a hobby into something more.

Redesigned Product Deal

It all begins with an idea. Maybe you want to launch a business. Maybe you want to turn a hobby into something more.

Iterations & Testing

Tested Deal List

It all begins with an idea. Maybe you want to launch a business. Maybe you want to turn a hobby into something more.

Redesigned Deal List

It all begins with an idea. Maybe you want to launch a business. Maybe you want to turn a hobby into something more.

Final Results & Impact

What We Launched

It all begins with an idea. Maybe you want to launch a business. Maybe you want to turn a hobby into something more or maybe you have a creative project.

Business & User Impact

It all begins with an idea. Maybe you want to launch a business. Maybe you want to turn a hobby into something more or maybe you have a creative project.