Our UX Journey with Australian e-Commerce store Canningvale
Our Problem Statements
- How might we uncover the way users view the client's brand?
- How might we reduce cart abandonment and drop-off points on the client's mobile site?
- How might we come up with user-centric marketing strategies for the client to move forward with?
Key Opportunities from our UX Research
1A. Do the work for the busy customer
- Use visuals to help customers imagine product embedded in their home spaces
- Curate items by event (“Christmas"), style (“maximalist"), and space (“kitchen")
- Remove distractions from pop ups to hard-to-find discount codes
- Strengthen personalised marketing and recommendations
- Shorten scroll length
1B. Improve findability through Information Architecture
- Reduce the overwhelming options in nav bar to reduce cognitive load
- Looking at one product category and its sub-categories: Beach Towels > Categories / Collections / Featured / Shop Sale...
- The subcategories Categories, Collections and Featured have at least 7 links each that the user can click on. That makes 21 possibilities under just 1 product category! (There are 9 product categories.)
- Improve metadata labelling for products
- For one, the search term king sized bed sheets only brings out one product amongst the many the client has
- Improve filtering so products offered are more relevant
2. Tap on existing associations between bedding & use visuals
- Use storytelling and influencers to play up themes of luxury and adulting
- Play up the brand's brand story (affordable and high quality Australian-owned brand) along these lines
- Provide educational content and increase their findability; focus on styling and bedding care for users easing into “adulting"
Our Process
1. User Interviews + Surveys + Persona Creation
We conducted UX Interviews with existing Canningvale clients to create a persona for our client. This helped us prioritise our redesigns and suggestions for the customer journey.
2. Brand Audit
With my experience in digital marketing and writing, I took charge of the brand audit for our client.
2A. Competitive Analysis + Exploring Existing UX Research
Our competitive analysis focused on strengths, weaknesses, content design, and opportunities presented by competitors.
I also cross referenced our work with existing e-commerce UX research from credible sources such as Baymard.
This gave us a solid research foundation to justify our design choices, rather than run the risk of blindly copying competitors.
2B. Social Listening
I chose to do social listening using tools such as Mention to understand what our client's target audience was saying about homeware and bedding, their main product.
This broadened our insights from the survey we ran, which was targeted only at our client's existing clients.
3. Usability Testing
In testing the mobile site, we prepared scenarios that led users through various customer journeys we imagined our persona to follow through. This helped us identify key pain points where the customer could fall off their journey.
4. Card Sort
To reduce the overwhelming number of options in the Nav Bar that also overlapped, we did an open card sort to see how users would intuitively group and identify overlaps in existing subcategories on the Nav Bar.
5. Design (Re)Iteration
With our findings, we redesigned the mobile site for our client and imitated the customer journey of a persona
My Takeaways
- Profit is king in an e-commerce project. Bringing my experience with marketing and branding into UX research makes for richer, more holistic insights when crafting a cohesive direction across departments for the client.
- As such, it's also crucial for the client to find a healthy, profitable design solution that balances the needs of existing customers, new target audiences, UX best practices, and more.
- Geographical contexts are more important than I (a city girl!) had thought in shaping personas; my identity shapes the assumptions I bring to my research.
- For one, free shipping and time taken to drive to a store were big factors for respondents who lived in the suburbs.
My Next Steps for the Project
- My next iteration of the information architecture be to test our proposed IA with existing super-customers to see how they would bring their existing mental model to it.
- The data would serve as data for a stronger case with the client on changing an IA they assumed was serving their clients well.
- Communicate more closely with the web designer and reiterate our designs according to what their webpage host client is able and unable to do.
