Problem
When we conducted UX research related to the Extension Library, we repeatedly heard one piece of feedback:
“The content is great, but it’s difficult to find something if you don’t already know what you’re looking for.”
When the MVP was initially launched the listed all of the extensions on the homepage, with some basic filtering and sorting options (see above). It was still functional, but it acted more like a search results page, rather than a homepage for a marketplace that modern users would be used to with the rise of Apples App Store, and other popular marketplace type sites.
Knowing this was an area of the site that needed some love, we set out on a mission to find a better approach in early 2021.
Solution
Customers look to the Rapid7 to advise them on what extensions they should be using. With some 500 extension listed on the site, we should find a way to recommend content to new and existing customers so they don’t have to go searching for it.
Research
We kicked off some research by reaching out to a wide range of users for the site. We wanted a mix of new and more mature customers, as well as customers who have used the library a lot vs customers who had barely used it.
From this research we gathered some key insights around what customers wanted to see and what was missing from the old home page:
- Personalised recommendations based on the third party tools they use
- A way to see what other customers are using
- Use case based recommendations
- Content from Discuss, Rapid7’s customer forum
Decisions
Once I had analysed, and completed a few UX workshops with the team we started to make some design decisions on the project.
Recommendations
From the research, personalised recommendations was the piece of feedback that came up most often. We took this advice and implemented it into a number of areas on the homepage. One such area is the My categories section. This is a list of extensions that feature cybersecurity categories that a customer has expressed interested in and cross references the third party tools the customer uses to create a customised list of extensions that suit their own needs.
Use cases
We already had a section of the site dedicated to cybersecurity use cases, but the pages weren’t getting enough traffic (despite being in the sites header). I decided to change the placement and move links to the content into the body of the home page, which saw a 18% increase in traffic to the pages.
Result
