Contextual Discovery as a feature
What does it mean?
Serving up interesting data to users without them searching for it. Here, showing data means creating a feature which helps with product discovery and conversion.
One way to do Contextual Discovery is shown below:
How does it look?
Let me show you an example before going deeper:
Frame 1 is the basic page you must see in all food ordering apps. The bottom banner is where something different happens. Rather than redirecting the user to a food listing, the feature is more about engagement and making the user curious. The user might think “Hmmmm. What is this new type of Pizza?”.
Frames 2 & 3 are where you start building the narrative around what was marketed in Frame 1. The purpose is to educate, showcase something new to the user, and make him go through a journey of how a Pizza is made. If this experiment shows success, I would add 15 seconds video on how “Sourdough Pizza is made” just to get the user's brain to start producing more dopamine and stomach to start producing hydrochloric acid. My end goal is the user is so engaged that he wants the Pizza in the next 30 minutes.
Frame 4 is what some people might call the “Money shot”. This is where we convert the user. From each story, there is a takeaway, from this story the takeaway is the Pizza! (Pun intended)
Why will it work?
In the end, for any product to be successful, there needs to be an intersection of the users’ needs and business needs. The user wants to try new things which they like. But they have very less clue about where to start since each food app has around 1000+ food items. That’s where this feature of “Contextual Discovery” comes into play. Better the conversion, the better it’s for the business. It’s a win-win.
Generalising this to other areas
“Contextual Discovery” can be around improving the discovery of any new or less visible product/item/category of an item.
- If you’re a stock finance app you can talk about ETF expense ratio, holdings in ETFs, you can talk about returns/ P/E ratio as an indicator to buy stocks and etc. Here, you can educate users about how to factor X(let’s say P/E ratio) affects stock selection and then showcase the stock listing filtered by that P/E ratio.
- If you’re a furniture renting app you can talk about a new type of furniture(let’s say a rocking chair) which is in your store, how a rocking chair melts into any house’s ambience(making the user curious), and how fun it is to have it(showcasing what he is missing in life), and at last showcase, the top rocking chairs in the area which the user can buy.
