Gumroad Persona research
Roles: UX researcher / UI designer
The Client :
Gumroad is a digital distribution and e-commerce website where a variety of creatives can sell digital products directly to their audience.
The Problem:
Sellers and buyers enjoy using gumroad but seem to want more from the platform.
Opportunity Statement:
To learn how to best support creatives and buyers to connect and share their passion.
Research Methods:
During this stage I looked to gain a clearer understanding on who the users of Gumroad are and their experiences with the website.
user survey
Goal: To get a base understanding of general user’s experience with Gumroad.
Technology: Survey Monkey, Reddit, Facebook groups, Instagram.
Method: Users were gathered from social media groups geared towards creative small business owners.
Key Findings:
Creatives are more likely to use the website to sell and buy goods.
Users rarely go to the Gumroad website to buy digital goods.
A majority of users struggle to find products on the website.
User Types:
After the user survey I was able to break the users down into two categories based on their use of Gumroad:
Buyers: Users who primarily use the Gumroad to buy creative goods from sellers.
Seller: Users who primarily use the Gumroad to independently sell creative products to buyers.
USer Interviews
Goal: Getting more long form answers around buyers’ and sellers’ experiences using the website.
Technology: Zoom Reddit Email Instagram
Method: Users from screen will be interviewed based on their user type.
Seller Key Findings:
No real storefronts like other digital marketplace
It is easy to set up but harder to know how to optimize
Lack of community
From these findings, I distilled them down to three opportunity areas. More storefront customization for sellers to showcase their brand to future buyers on Gumroad. Clearer guides to help newer sellers understand their selling analytics and optimize their storefront sales. Finally for opportunities for users to interact with each other and participate on the website like forums, and direct messaging features.
Buyer key Findings:
Only go to Gumroad if directed by creator to do so
Search engine not very useful if you don’t know what you’re looking for
Storefronts don't offer as much clarity on seller as other digital marketplaces
These findings indicate buyers would benefit from stronger search engine optimization, which would help them discover new sellers on Gumroad. To support this even further, we can incorporate more robust seller profiles with reviews and bios to help buyers build more trust in the creatives they find and buy from.
Competitive Analysis
Goal: To understand what the competitive landscape looks like for Gumroad and find areas of strength and weaknesses for competitor platforms.
Method: Collecting data of 5 direct competitors and 3 indirect competitors and comparing them across different categories:
social media presence,
feature sets
content type
personalization features
Desktop and in-app purchasing
monthly traffic
Key Findings:
Loyalty programs generate mixed-to-poor results; there are stronger drivers of brand loyalty than programs.
Storefront customization features to help build brand identity are a regular features for many competitors.
Users of competitors praise promotional features like up-sells, down-sells, and bump features.
Community building features on platform like direct messages, regulated community forums, post.
These key findings showed a trend of e-commerce websites and applications making it easier for the buyers to process purchases in a variety of different ways through their multiple payment gateways. User reviews stated that with storefront customization features they could better build their brand and offer a variety of selling options which lead to increased traction from users. Lastly, offering community building features was a consistent benefit from these competitors that many users stated as a plus for their experience on the platforms.
Direct competitors: (row 1) Sendowl, Chirpify, Shopify, (row 2) Payhip, Selz
Indirect competitors: ( left to right) Etsy, DeviantArt, Patreon
Audience profiles and Personas
From these research insights and takeaways I was able to create two audience profiles and user personas based on the earlier stated user types.
Next Steps
From this process I can move onto brainstorming new features based on the needs uncovered in the audience profiles and personas. These features include improving SEO, community building features on the platform and creating more accessible business optimization tools for new sellers on the website. This project will also benefit from continued research on Gumroad competitors’ features to help direct the new features. Afterwards, I will move to user testing of these new features and take the results into the new iteration of the features.