Shutterstock Pricing Page

Product Design (UX-UI)
Company: Shutterstock
Research & Design collaborators: Maggie McKosky, Pierre-Luc Soumis
Year: 2019-2020

Optimizing the Shutterstock pricing page

Shutterstock is a global online marketplace providing royalty-free stock assets, tools, and services. When I joined the company in 2017, the team’s long-term mission was to consolidate Shutterstock’s products portfolio in a unique, holistic user experience. We started with the migration and redesign of the whole Footage interface, which gave me a lot of experience and knowledge about our new design system and processes. Following the Footage migration’s success, the time had come to start on the Images product’s side. I was offered to join forces and help lead an activation-focused initiative touching a crucial and complex web page for our business: the pricing page.

Phase 1 – Migrating the 1.0 Images pricing page for experience consistency

Our first step in the Images pricing page overhaul was to migrate it to our new platform, Studio, using styles and components from our design system while maintaining 100% feature parity. I also prepared detailed specs documentation when handing off prototypes to engineers who were still onboarding on the new Studio platform and the Shutterstock design system. The documentation included details about the grid system, breakpoints and responsive behaviour, redlining of styles, components, patterns, and variables like section spacing.

Phase 2 – Optimizing the 2.0 Images pricing page to facilitate our customers' decision process

Several usability tests and user interviews on the Images pricing page highlighted one central pain point: the page looked busy and complicated. Users found the different plans and price offerings confusing, and a majority expressed feeling overwhelmed, not knowing what to choose or not finding what they needed. From a business perspective, we were not effectively convincing our users to take action and buy the plan that would suit them best, losing an opportunity to grow our base of loyal, returning customers, generating a predictable recurring revenue.

Numerous research studies examined the concept of “paradox of choice,” which reveals that too many offerings make it harder for users to decide due to analysis paralysis. Contrary to the common belief that more choice is better for consumers, choice overload hinders decision-making. It can also lead to buyer’s remorse (in our case, resulting in growing calls to our customer care team for cancellation requests).

Our strategy became quickly apparent: to help our customers make their purchase decisions efficiently, we needed to remove as much confusion and friction as possible around our complex offering. After completing our user research with some competitors and best pricing pages analysis, we started exploring diverse tactics and solutions in several rounds of wireframes: better categorization and information hierarchy, structured layout, clearer UX copywriting, comparison tables, progressive disclosure patterns, etc.Phase 2 was about redesigning the e-commerce pricing page experience based on user research insights and a business decision to build a unified, multi-assets model.

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We worked through continuous cross-team collaboration and feedback collection, presenting our design explorations to a diverse group of stakeholders at each touchpoint of our design process. We ended up with two different approaches that we developed in hi-fi prototypes and submitted to several rounds of usability tests using the UserTesting platform.
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Our second option revealed itself as the clear winner, thanks to a clear division between our single user and multiple users model and a new, powerful interactive card component providing more structured, digestible information.

→ What you buy (number of images in your plan or pack)
→ What it costs (monthly or one-time payment)
→ What are the billing options (subscriptions)
→ What type of license you’ll need (packs)
→ Additional info (commitment, etc.)

Phase 3 – Testing and monitoring results

I finalized responsive states and proper documentation to hand off to our engineering team so they could start implementation and be ready for our next phase: testing the winner option to our control version (the pricing page 2.0 we designed in phase 1).

We hypothesized that optimizing the Images pricing page to reflect all products and options better will smooth the user experience and improve the conversion rate. Our audience was all visitors reaching shutterstock.com/pricing, with an average daily target visitor segment of approximately 30,000. We tracked and measured total orders (packs and subscriptions) as our main KPI, conversion rate, order value, product mix, page metrics such as bounce and exit rates, interactions, and so on, for an estimated test duration of 5 weeks.

Early results were positive enough for the team to roll the new page out to 100% and closely monitor its future performance.

→ Relative 2% lift in order rate
→ Increased appetite for annual upfront plans
→ Shifts in clicks behaviour with significant usage of the License Type drop-down in the interactive card component
→ Increased purchases of Enhanced License packs
→ Increased engagement around the Multiple Users tab and Teams offering
→ Slight decrease in interactions with the Contact us options on both Single and Multiple Users pages, indicating less confusion and better clarity around plans and pricing (something to confirm later with our Global Customer Care team).