One step closer to monetization

Hello everybody, I am CHEN Taoyu. My website is a city walk website, aiming to provide a place for city walk lovers to find out and share the proper city walk routine, and discover the attractive buildings in Shanghai, especially the emerging mid-class family in Shanghai who are eager to get cultural education. This is my website.
Compared to the other platform like Red or Ma-feng-wo, my website is more focus on the tourism itself rather than selling the touring service. As for the monetization, previously I thought that people might be willing to pay for the tourism information, and my previous interview proved this. However, after the prototype came out, the usability tests illustrated that the website may not meet with the expectations of paying users. Thus, I contacted with the youtuber “城考君”，who are running a company providing the service of city walk guidance，and repositioned the website as an entrance of flow of offline city walk. Premium subscribers are able to get a discount on the offline city campaign organized by “城考君”. In this way, the website can be monetized by profit sharing with the “城考君”.

My usability test questions are as follow:
1. where you can click to find out the proper routines?
2. Sharing your traveling experience
3.look for the interesting buildings you want to go?
4.log in
5.If you want to conduct an offline city walk, what would you do?
6.would like to pay for the routine guide service?

During usability test, I found that many of the participant cannot find the login button. Also, “Blog” might be a little confusing for the users in mainland. A participant mentioned the button “點擊開啟線下城考！” looks like a downloading button, so he won’t click it. The test actually make me changed my idea of monetization.

In the A/B test part, I made some changes mostly in the navigation bar. In my monetization plan, except for the additional information, the main value of the membership is the discount on the offline city walk guide service. So I am wondering which one should be placed in the most conspicuous position in the navigation bar, the Login button or the “點擊開啟線下城考！” button that points to the service directly. In the B version, I enlarged the sign-up button and placed it in the top right corner of the page.

The result of the A/B test showed that it might be better to remain the original design. The orginal design obtained higher conversion rate. For more information, please click here.