Bookvid is a marketplace for subject experts to share their expertise and charge for their presence. Experts can create multi-seats virtual events or offer 1:1 more personalized sessions.

Bookvid sets out to solve the problem of disjointed experiences for subject experts who wanted to schedule live video sessions with their guests. On the other hand, for the guests, there is no easy way to connect and interact with experts for knowledge sharing.

In the past, subject experts had to go through multiple different tools to schedule a video call with their guests. Particularly, collecting payments was always a pain. Therefore, Bookvid was born as the end-to-end solution for subject experts to schedule, conduct video calls as well as instantly get paid after the session.

When I joined the company, they had parts of the product ecosystem built out. I was brought in to redesign their marketplace for the subject experts and their guests. The marketplace is where the guests would be able to discover, search and book video sessions with the experts. In addition, it is a place where subject experts would be able to show their offerings for the guests to book. The product ecosystem was showcased below, and how the two sides of the users interact with each other through the product ecosystem.

I redesigned the expert marketplace and it went live in Nov 2023. Here is the current state of the product:

At the start of this project, the first thing I did was to conduct an UX auditing.

The UX Auditing concludes that: 1. Guest experience is not optimized. 2. The brand experience is completely disconnected.

The team was aggressively pushing their business objective. Therefore, they created the original user flow which was to actually land both experts and guests on a marketing page, which was solely to convince experts to sign up on the platform. There was an entry point on the top nav for both users to navigate to the old marketplace. However, I suspect most guests land on the marketing page confused and there was a massive drop-off for the demand-side users (guests) at this point. Upon many other design issues, another noticeable problem was that the branding of the host profile and onward pages completely disconnected with the prior marketplace designs. We had users gave us feedback that they thought they were on another website.

Upon examining the only two direct competitors, Intro and ADPlist, I could see that both of them cater their homepages to the guests (demand-side users) via copy writing and offerings, and provide an entry point on the top nav to a marketing page that provides more information to sign up as an expert on the platform. Both marketplace homepages insert marketing languages throughout - my assumption is that they are still new platforms under 2-3 years old and they are trying to attract new users who aren’t familiar with their product.

As an important part of my design process, I always like to do cross-industry examination. If there are no big players in the field, it is important to look outside the industry at bigger and more established marketplace products. Airbnb is a product that really inspires me. Their marketplace homepage is clean, efficient, without marketing jargons. Guests could go straight to their offerings and find what they need in the most straightforward and efficient way.

According to Nielsen Norman Group, efficiency is the number one important thing for marketplace UX, which includes product discovery, loading time etc. Plus, more established marketplaces like Airbnb’s success proves that.

In the redesign of Bookvid’s marketplace, I followed Airbnb’s approach to redesign a marketplace homepage that is clean, efficient. There is also an entry point that leads to an “About” page that would provide more information about the product and company for the new users to the platform.

My hypothesis is that optimizing the user experience for guests would not decrease the number of sign-ups from experts.

A big design and product market fit challenge for this project is that we don’t know what kinds of subject experts and what kinds of guests that it is targeting at. The #1 question, what niches are these users in?

One might say that marketplace could win and dominate the market share by the number of categories / niches that it offers. Think Amazon, that it has a vast number of categories for different types of products and it became the one-stop shop for purchases. However, if you look at how Amazon started, it started with one niche: book selling. Therefore, it is crucial to start with a focus and targeted users, then branch out. Trying to target at broad types of users makes it extremely hard to design product features as well as running marketing campaigns could become quite costly.

The design strategy is to assume a few niches, test / experiment and tweak. My design goal is that through this experiment phase, we will be able to create an archetype of the guest user. Then, we use the interest from demand side to drive sign-ups from experts.

So how did I come up with the niches / categories? First of all, we added the categories from direct competitor Intro. The reasoning is that Intro probably has validated interests for these niches. Secondly, we added a few highly searched niches on Google, such as AI (ChatGPT), which could naturally drive organic traffic to our product from searches. Lastly, there are a few unique niches that we wanted to test interests in, such as matchmaking, crypto, influencer etc.

The core design features were created based on the business objective and design research. The business objective is that the 1-to-many group events is the primary revenue driver. The design research from Nielson Norman Group describes that there are 5 types of marketplace users (guests).

So the 5 types of guest users:

• Product-focused: this user knows exactly what to look for - hence an efficient search functionality is important.

• Browser: this user is browsing and new/trendy content attracts them.

• Research: this user is comparing and collecting information - hence clear product / service description is important.

• Bargain Hunter: this user shops deals and needs to see clear pricing.

• One-time user: this user doesn’t know the product yet, and would want to view information without registration required.

In my redesign on the right, first of all, the 1-to-many group events were surfaced right on the top to meet the business objective. There is no registration needed for the guests to view and book any sessions, hence meeting the user need of one-time user specifically. A search functionality was designed and implemented for the product-focused user. A trendy tab of content was added for browser, but also hoping to increase user retention rate with fresh content. Pricing was also surfaced right up front for the bargain hunter user.

An initial user interviews with 5 potential guests reveals an important user insight: “how do I know if the subject expert is legit especially if the session costs money?”

I conducted an initial user interview with 5 potential guest users, and I asked them a few questions about what information would be important to know when booking a live session with an expert on the platform. Trust came as the number one thing that the guest users look for, especially most sessions range from $50+. A few data points that seem to be important to the guest users:

• Session price

• Expert’s background and YOE

• Expert’s interest and skills

• Social validation on the expert

Social validation is interesting. There are many ways of going about, and the most obvious one is reviews. However, reviews could go both ways. Upon a deeper competitive analysis on both direct competitor ADPList as well as cross-industry platform such as LinkedIn, I discovered a few other interesting approaches. ADPlist uses internal platform stats, such as total mentoring time and # of sessions completed on the platform as a social validation point. This approach motivates experts to keep using the platform for better social currency, and hence increasing engagement rate. LinkedIn gives users a verification badge if users meet certain criteria, which helps creates trust in the platform.

Based on the overwhelming user feedback, in the redesign on the right hand side, I prioritized adding information about the expert to help establish trust between the guest and the expert. Data points such as background, tools & specialities were added. In addition to that, basic platform usage stats such as hosting time, as well as platform verification badge were added to the profile page. We also provide more information on our verification process to verify the expert. All of these were designed to increase trust and hence the booking revenue from the guests.

After launch, the sign-ups from experts or supply-side users actually increased by 50%, from 100 to 148. Initial user data shows interests from guests in the career & business - specifically, the book author niche. The highest booked session was $400 / 15 mins. 

The first result proves my hypothesis. What we heard from the experts who signed up is that they are more convinced to sign up when they see the offerings from other experts on the marketplace, which motivates them to sign up more than reading through a page of marketing language. Peer validation is stronger. We had some initial interest in the career & business - book author niche, but it will require a few more months to get more solidified user data.

The main takeaway from this project is that UX should always be incorporated in the product ideation phase. In this project, the founders created a technology solution and then trying to fit it into the ideal user. Finding product market fit later down the road would prove more difficult.