TopRedesigning an e-commerce site for better brand discoverability.
Our Team Roles:
Iris:
User Research, UI (Style Guide), Mobile Prototyping
Li Wei:
User Research, Ideation
Sze Yee:
User Research, Ideation, Wireframing( Mobile, Desktop), Prototyping (Mobile, Desktop), Usability Testing
Joseph:
User Research, Research Analysis, Ideation, Wireframing (Desktop), Prototyping (Desktop), Usability Testing.
Tools used:
Figma, Kardsort, Miro, Google Sheets, Zoom
Project timeline:
March 2021- May 2021
Ethical Merchants is an e-commerce platform that hosts multiple brands seeking to eschew the usual tropes of fast fashion and consumption.
As part of our final project for our User Experience Design course, my team and I chose to work with the owner of Ethical Merchants as we resonated strongly with the idea of ethical shopping.
Thus, we sought to improve the experience of the Ethical Merchants site.
Prior to conducting screening surveys and remote User interviews, we sat down with our primary stakeholder to sketch out what he would like from the project. Through our discussion, we determined that the stakeholder:
- Would like to know more about who his Users are
- Noted there was a noticeably low conversion rate, and wanted to find out why
- Wanted to know how Users felt about and interacted with the Ethical Merchants Blog section
We started by conducting screening surveys to discover:
- The basic demographic information of Users
- Users' ethical and sustainable product purchasing habits
We followed by conducting remote user interviews via video call to discover:
- The ease of finding specific product details
- The ease of finding specific brand information on the site
- Users' impression of the blog section of the Ethical Merchants site
Affinity Map of all found problems
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User flows
Through our surveys, we found:
- Most of the Users who had an interest in ethical shopping and sustainability were females aged between 25–35 years of age
- Most had discovered Ethical and Sustainable shopping through social media, followed by other traditional media followed by word of mouth.
- While the majority of people surveyed made purchases in personal care category, they were most interested in making a purchase from the homeware or associated category.
- The factors most considered when making a purchase are quality, price, and materials or ingredients used.
Through our interviews, we found:
- Blog Criticisms: Users found the blog section to be irrelevant, disorganised, or were completely unaware of the section in the first place
- Purchasing considerations: Price and benefit were among Users’ considerations, but they were also looking for the significance, or the meaning behind their purchases.
- Individual Brands: Brand trust was low, most users made mention of exiting the Ethical Merchants site to find brand information elsewhere. One user made mention she would rather just buy sustainable goods from a brand she already is familiar with.
- Site criticisms: Users felt the site was geared more towards sales rather than sustainability and ethical awareness, that the site was difficult to navigate. On the positive side, the search function stood out to Users.
- About page: This section was hard to locate
Additionally, most Users were noted having trouble locating the requested item (Cup). Furthermore, there was feedback that the categories on the site were confusing.
This finding led us to run a Card Sort.
For the Card Sorting activity, a total of 39 items from the site were selected for a hybrid card sort- we chose to do a Hybrid Card Sort for two reasons:
- The large number of items on the site suggested that there may be some overlapping or redundant categories.
- There was feedback that some items on the site were improperly categorised. The items were selected on a basis of keeping to the recommended number of items (<50 cards), and also, item duplicates were excluded.
We used this article as a guide to process our Card sort results. A total of 18 Card Sort results were gathered, and the data was first tallied to a matrix, before similar categories were then collapsed for easier sorting.
The numbers in the Card Sort matrix were then changed to percentages based off the total number of Users vs number of Users who put an item in any given category.
Lastly, we sorted the percentages by category to show clearly where most of the items had been placed by Users. You can see the full sheet here.
- New category, “Stationery” was suggested by a large number of users for the item, “notebook” and “hand fan”.
This suggests that there may be a need for a new category as Ethical Merchants continues to expand its Brand and product line.
- There were some items, such as the “Clutch”, “Yoga Mat Spray”, and “linen spray” which had a significant percentage of Users placing them in more than one category.
Our team theorised this might suggest the need to include items in multiple categories.
- Finally, in relation to one of the tasks in the User Interviews earlier, the Item “Cup”
had the highest allocation percentage (50%) to the category homeware- suggesting a need to shift its category accordingly.
We then created a User Persona with a User Journey to help us better empathise:
From the research results we gathered, we defined our problem statements as:
- “How might we increase the brand trust of Ethical Merchants so as to motivate Users to make a purchase from the site?”
- “How might we increase the accessibility of each brand’s information so as to encourage them to make a purchase?”
With these problem statements- there was a focus on enhancing the visibility of both individual brand and Ethical Merchants information, helping the User to understand the nuance behind the brands in an effort to increase purchase motivation.
From the information gathered, we then generated a word-cloud, produced an affinity map, used dot voting to select key areas to examine, and began working out some ideas for both the web and mobile versions of the Ethical Merchants site:
Our team created a style guide with the intention of giving the Ethical Merchants site a more “natural” look. We selected more neutral tones, and chose to remain with the Raleway font, keeping legibility in mind.
For our usability testing, we interviewed 5 users and asked them to perform 2 tasks, then use a Likert scale to rate their experience in using both web and mobile sites.
Task 1: Find individual brand information on the site
Task 2: Find information about Ethical Merchants on the site
- Users found having the brand information at the top of the individual brand page helpful
- Users did not feel that the current picture located on the “about” page for Ethical Merchants tells them more about the brand
- Users found it much easier to locate information about both individual brands, as well as Ethical Merchants itself.
- The style guide, though intended to reflect a more natural and sustainable look, may appear dated due to the colours chosen.
To round things off, our team handed off the new design to the Owner of Ethical Merchants for development.
Working on a live site was very insightful for the me- the time limit that we agreed on together with the stakeholder was stretched to a limit, and we had to focus on what changes would have the biggest positive impact for both the User and Stakeholder.
Also, there is almost always room for improvement- iterations of the app we created received its fair share of both positive and negative comments-comments we could have used to improve the app, were it not for our time constraints.
