Summary

Managing proactiv.com not only gave me the experience to be a product owner, it opened up my career path in UX design. While my experience was incredibly challenging as this was the early stages of my career, it gave me the foundational experience to be the creative professional I am today. I participated in 60+ A/B tests on the proactiv website, was constantly updating content and optimizing the shopping experience against key business KPIs.

I joined Guthy-Renker in 2011…

At the time, the traditional marketing industry was being turned upside down from the .com boom. When I got to Guthy-Renker at the end of 2011, the company was at it’s largest size to date due to the Proactiv brand’s commercial success. If you were in the US in the 2000s, you’ve seen perhaps one too many Proactiv Acne skincare commercials on TV. The brand had saturated the market and it had built up the company to have an office in Santa Monica over 200 employees. It was the number one acne skin care product on the market but the landscape was changing significantly. TV commercial direct marketing sales were waning as consumer habits moved away from TV and more online. People were calling phones to order products less and more online sales were happening. This caused several rounds of layoffs - The TV, print media, marketing and branding teams were all being significantly gutted in size. The only department growing was Digital. I found my role managing proactiv.com to become one of significant interest and importance at the company.

My time working on proactiv.com gave me the experience of launching a new product line - Proactiv+ which was stronger than the original product and priced higher. I became savvy and learned how to manage requests and needs from various departments outside of my own within the company. I learned how the website orders drove business KPIs and became engaged in various tests to improve sales. And in the end it drove me to become a UX designer.

My journey to UX Design…

As manager of the most revenue generating website for the company by a mile (90%+ of revenue was Proactiv back then), I found myself in a very fast paced environment where there were too many requests for website updates that could be serviced by development resources so I constantly had to manage difficult expectations with various departments under pressure to perform. Often the departments with the most power got what they wanted updated on the website. I noticed at there was a gap in the process. Leaders outside of the creative team and digital department where making the decisions for the website. There was no design thinking! No one in the company specialized in UX design.

After doing my research, I felt it was my responsibility as well as my natural career path to transform my role from proactiv.com digital project manager to UX designer. I made a presentation to the Digital leadership and was funded to be trained in User Experience Design on weekends at General Assembly.

Every week I would learn design principles and skills that I would immediately apply to my work on proactiv.com . I immediately influenced was the culture of testing that was already present at Guthy-Renker. User centered design thinking stresses testing out products and experiences but from a more qualitative approach. At Guthy-Renker, quantitative testing using Adobe Target (Called Test & Target back then).

ABCs - Always be Testing!

I oversaw 60+ A/B tests on proactiv.com. They fell into the follow categories:

Proactiv.com Testing Approaches

Most of the work on the proactiv.com website was driven by the Marketing Acquistion department around product mix testing. The head of marketing acquisition, who became a mentor to me, had increased sales by 20% in 2011 by testing out how various Proactiv product lines were presented on the website. I oversaw the production of A/B tests to increase customer acquisition around:

Different product upsells
Various product configurations
Various pricing strategies
Various home page design presentations
Different TV spots and brand advocates

This helped inform business decisions around the following KPIs:

LTV - Customer Lifetime Value - this would increase drastically with the emphasis of 90 Day supply offers for Proactiv. It was subscription based with many customers who purchased 30 Day kits cancelling within the first 3 months.
Conversion Rate - the percent of customers that would purchase the product once they reached the website.
Upsell Rate - the percent of customers that would purchase a product mix priced at a more premium price point

I introduced the company to wireframing…

And User Testing…

This added to the business KPIs by providing user centered KPIs:

Task success rate
Time-on-task
User error rate

With UserZoom I was able to present findings in ways Adobe Target could not, helping key stakeholders make decisions on how to position the product. This resulted in a more streamlined flatly architected website with less content pages as it became clear that users who ventured into the content pages were less likely to convert to a sale.

My Impact

* Proactiv.com would continue to improve in the years to come but I left it more optimized and well positioned to drive sales.

I am proud of the work I accomplished on proactiv.com. This is especially true as it relates to the website’s testing and product optimization over three years. At a time when UX design was relatively unknown before being massively adopted, I played my part at Guthy-Renker by introducing UX principles, user testing and UX KPIs to compliment the business KPIs. By the time I left I had A/B tested:

Dozens of Proactiv product offering mixes
Dozens of Celebrities
Many variations of PR promotional content
Dozens of different CTA/messages and homepage banners

The result was a website that saw stronger performances in conversion rates and LTV year over year and shortly after I left… the first full time UX Designer was hired!

Managing Proactiv.com