Viacheslav (Slava) Barinov
Now in Cyprus
Scope
UI/UX Design, Product Strategy, Art Direction, Prototyping, Design system
Role
Lead Product Designer
Years
2019 — 2022
Platform
Web, Mobile
Users
Curious People
Foreword
In 2019, Yandex acquired a Q&A service, TheQuestion. I joined its product team with some of the best product managers & culture overall on the market a couple of months later to make Yandex Q out of it.
Challenge
Research
With the help of an in-house research team and multiple user research sessions we managed to establish a number of user needs we wanted to address in Q:
✳︎ 1
Need to find a trustworthy answer as fast as possible
✳︎ 2
Need to see the full picture: a plurality of opinions on different topics
✳︎ 3
Need to stand out & express your expert point in a safe environment while easily finding exciting questions to answer
✳︎ 4
Need to be a part of something bigger, like a community
Solution
Most of our user journeys start from the question page which they get from the search results page on Google or Yandex. So, most of our experiments were held here:
Answers could be in many forms, for example, video answers besides residing on the question page had their own carousel with a TikTok-like player:
A place for onboardings
I'll show a couple out of the dozens flows we experimented with.
This one addressed the problem that users were unaware of us, so we experimented with small nudging toward Q comprehension. We suggested that users are familiar with Instagram stories-like concept of swiping and we loved how it got executed.
On desktop, they felt just as good as on mobile devices:
Spoiler: Unfortunately, the experiment was not successful metrics-wise.
Another experiment with a more straightforward flow was a bit brutal on users but helped to achieve crucial business metrics on user acquisition.
Solution
We sorted all the exciting answers appearing on Q into 6 categories or “supertopics”, as we called them, for users to be easily engaged. It boosted the time-spent metric and user engagement overall.
Every detail worked towards a correct product perception by users. For example, these welcome pages also helped to convey the idea of diversity and opinion plurality on our platform
Solution
Experts were the heart of our communities: their voices were louder, their answers and posts gained more attention, they had an ability to verify content. So, to become one of them I designed a self-explanatory flow that helped to convert thousands of readers into experts.
Solution
Naturally, people started forming groups of interest around experts or a specific topic, so to support this we developed communities, stepping into the Reddit field.
Solution
Results
3M+
DAU in peak
20K+
of high-profile experts registered
3K+
of active communities in peak
Afterword
In 2022 it became quite impossible to maintain an unbiased UGC service in Russia due to censorship laws. I left the company a couple of months after the invasion. In 2023 Yandex Q product was frozen in development.
