Slant Summary Cards

One of the main elements of Slant has always been the summary card. Because it pulls from across the web and from the community at the same time, deciding what to show, and when, was always top of mind.

We regularly ran experiments to keep the card balancing community, visitors, SEO, and business goals. These were the bigger changes over the years.

This is what I came to when I joined Slant. The team had already been through many iterations to get here, and the meat of the information was on point — but there's always room for improvement.

The first major change after joining. We ran user testing and interviewed current and new users to understand what to change. The big one: breaking pros and cons into two columns for better skimming and SEO (more on the page). We also improved button design to lift conversion, and introduced user images to show that content is community-generated.

This iteration added even more content to the pros and cons to improve SEO. We introduced more faces from the community (which clicked with visitors and helped them understand how content gets generated) and began adding numbers to cards so visitors could read product rankings at a glance.

Gaming was one of our fastest-growing categories, and it needed a card of its own. This design rolled out with a focus on watching videos while scrolling the feed, surfacing key specs, and giving game descriptions so people understood the variety of products they'd see.

The most significant rework, rolling together everything we'd learned. Larger images across the top, a focus on quality images and video visitors could access right in the feed, and a ton of content moved behind tabs and a carousel. That kept all the SEO benefit while only displaying the most important information up front.

The next level for Slant was taking all the wonderful content the community had created and making it work for everyone. The trouble with jumping into Slant as a normal user is having to learn all the rules for how everything works. Guides was a new layer aimed squarely at the person just looking for the best sous vide machine, or the best 360 camera.

To design for this new kind of user we drew out personas to stay focused. We'd always had a clear picture of the core Slant user, but this was someone new, and we didn't want to get lost in the weeds.

With personas in hand we revisited old user interviews for insights we'd set aside, and they shaped our first designs. After the first round we hit a familiar wall: there's a massive gap between someone saying they'd buy in a study and actually sitting down to buy, so we moved the rest of testing onto the live site via A/B and other methods.

Guides was an experiment in figuring out the minimum we needed to help someone make a confident purchase. It didn't ship as a permanent fixture, but it sharpened our vision and reshaped the roadmap for the year that followed.