With - Host Directory

Project Overview

With is a marketplace where anyone can pay for face-to-face calls with celebrities, professionals, experts, and more.

The marketplace consists of two personas: hosts (the individuals hosting the calls) and members (the users paying for the calls).

The goal of this project was to allow hosts to extend a current session if the member requested an extension.

The Challenge

Create a new way for hosts to monetize their time during a live session.

Business Needs

Develop new sources of revenue for hosts and the business
Develop features requested by prominent hosts

User Needs

Balance the control members and hosts have over sessions
Allow hosts to monetize their time while avoiding awkward conversations about money

User Research

With’s beta product, Rave allowed celebrities to host paid meet-and-greets with fans. During that time, celebrities routinely requested one feature: the ability to extend session times during a live meet-and-greet. Hosts told us that members would often ask to keep talking with the host.

If the host had more time they might be willing to continue, but the product didn’t allow for the session to be extended. This meant that users would have to leave the current session, schedule a new session, and open a new link. This awkward process meant sessions were rarely extended. Unfortunately, that meant hosts (and the business) were missing out on an easy source of revenue: members were willing to pay for more time with hosts but didn’t have a natural way to extend the session and pay for more time.

After careful consideration, we decided this feature met both our user and business needs and decided to incorporate it into our new product, With.

Deeper Insights

We spoke with users to determine what would be necessary if we were to develop this feature. Hosts requested the ability to discretely ask users if they would like to extend the session but didn’t want to talk about money. They wanted members to be able to request more time, but only if the host was willing to extend the session. Members agreed this would be a useful feature, and wanted the process to be as easy as possible without distracting from or taking time away from their session.

Strategy

After engaging in user research, we determined the new feature would need to be controlled by the hosts. This allowed hosts to give members what they wanted, but only if their schedule allowed for it.

The Solution

For hosts who wanted to give their guests more time to talk, we created an elegant pop-up system that allows hosts to provide users with multiple options to extend their sessions.

**Host View - Extend Session Button**
Hosts can choose to offer an extension at any point during the conversation.

**Host View - Extend Session Pop-up**
When a host chooses to extend the session, a pop-up appears.

After prototyping the pop-up and showing it to our hosts, they requested the ability to add two options. This allowed hosts to offer a pricing ladder and gave member the ability to choose the price that worked best for them.

**Host View - Extend Session Pop-up - Two Options**
When the host chooses “Add another option” on the previous screen they’re able to share two session extension choices with their guests.

After the host shares the session extension request, a pop-up appears on the members’ screen.

**Member View - Extend Session Pop-up - Payment**
If the member chooses to extend the conversation, they can use their saved credit card information to quickly accept the request.

When the pop-up appears on the member screen, accepting the offer is as simple as choosing an option and paying to continue. Allowing the app to offer the session extension options means hosts don’t have to have awkward conversations involving money and allows members to make a choice discretely without worrying about offending their host.

Because the member has already paid for a session with the host, credit card information has already been saved in the app. This means hosts don’t need to take any payment information and members don’t need to manually enter any in.

Results

The initial response to the new pop-ups was overwhelming. Hosts were ecstatic, stating that they were grateful we listened to their request and added a feature they desperately needed.

Initial testing shows that hosts can share a session increase in less than 15 seconds, allowing the conversation to continue to flow naturally. Members can accept the request in the same time. The new process takes 30 seconds, compared to the 5+ minutes it previously took users to leave the current session, create a new session, and jump into a new call. This means

users will have a better experience connecting with each other in the app,
hosts have more opportunities to monetize their time, and
the business now has a new revenue source that didn’t exist before the feature was added.

My Role

I played an integral role in persona design, product design, branding, information architecture, product terminology, wireframing, flow charts, research, and UX writing.