Role: Lead Designer
Project Scope: Qualitative Testing, Ideation, Feature Validation, Design to Build, Prototyping, Stakeholder Mangement
Opportunity
Digital strategy leadership at RetailCo (Anonymized for privacy) wanted external perspective to help evaluate their ecommerce B2C flow. Our team was tasked with diagnosing critical areas of friction and to make recommendations for near-term optimizations as well as long-term enhancements.
Solution
We collaborated closely with client teams and end users to uncover key opportunities, build rapid prototypes, and validate solutions through live testing on our client’s website.
Stakeholder Interviews
Stakeholder interviews revealed that teams operate in very silo’d ways. Different teams are incentivized to different metrics which creates internal competition for resources. Complex beurocratic systems create a lot of friction on feature work.
Rapid Qualitative Research
Learnings from qualitative research showed that customers were finding the shopping experience at RetailCo to be overwhelming and confusing. This created frustration, distrust of RetailCo’s brand, and ultimately traffic diversion to competitor retail sites.
Site Analytics
An analysis of current web traffic analytics further dimensionalized the situation showing most common user flows as well as the most critical points of friction.
Mapping Key Opportunities
How might we help users understand configuration options and select what is right for their needs?
How might we identify customer needs early in order to help them easily navigate and accomplish their goals?
How might we minimize cognitive load needed for a user to feel confident about adding a product to cart?
Empathy Building
We socialized learnings from our own research and surfaced additional research already conducted by our client team to share more broadly with our stakeholder group
Ideation
Leveraging co-creation workshops accompanied by best-in-class e-commerce examples, we solutioned different directions to prototype
Testing
Working with our client’s testing dev team, we built prototypes to test four different opportunities we’d identified
Quick Shop Path
Approach
-
Simplify shopping path to 3 steps
-
Only show curated selection of options
-
Collapse dependencies to reduce cognitive load and ease decision making
Results
13%
Conversion in Test Flow
vs.
1.9%
Conversion in Traditional Flow
Product Configuration
Approach
-
Simplify presentation of configuration options
-
Increase skimmability and make it obvious what choices the user can make
-
Use human-friendly language to help non-technical users understand why they might choose one selection over another
Results
3% ^
Increase in Insurance Subscription
2X ^
Increase in Software Add-ons
Sticky Cart
Approach
-
Establish navigation consistency through-out the shopping flow to improve way-finding and sense of location
-
Provide transparency to users to help them understand how their price is updating based on configuration actions
