transforming customer experience.
From feedback to features, a usability study to improve the product searching, filtering and checkout experience.
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OVERVIEW
Context
Isabella's Clearly is a cosmetics retailer that prides itself in plant-based, natural beauty products with no-synthetic ingredients rooted in their Egyptian culture. The company currently receives 78% of sales from Amazon and 5% from wholesalers, both of whom take a 40-50% cut in revenue. Our goal was to improve the user experience of the commercial Squarespace site. If more customers feel satisfied with using the site directly, the client could greatly increase her profit margins with no increase in volume or price.
Role(s)
UX Analyst, UX Designer
Team
2 Design Researchers
Timeline
Jan - Mar 2024
About
Apprenticeship
Target Audience
Isabella’s Clearly current primary target audience is women ages 35 and up. The client had expressed interest in expanding their user base to a younger audience (primarily women).
We did some initial research to get a sense of the problem areas that had to be addressed by conducting a heuristic evaluation of the website...
PRELIMINARY RESEARCH - HEURISTIC EVALUATIONS
Laying the groundwork
Each member of the team conducted individual heuristic evaluations of the website, identifying a few areas for usability testing that came up the most frequently. Focus was placed on discoverability, sorting, and the checkout process.
DEFINING SCOPE
We realized that there's scope for a lot of growth and improvement with the current website. However, to ensure that we're hitting our target in the 3-month time frame, we narrowed down the scope to focus primarily on the product searching experience and checkout process.
Research Questions
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What steps do users take to locate or discover desired products on Isabella’s website?
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What are the common challenges they encounter during the process?
Goals 🎯
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reduce abandonment rates during checkout
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improve discoverability of products
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improve discoverability of help and documentation
Breaking down the research question further...
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What is the level of confidence that users have in using these features to accomplish specific tasks?
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How easily are users able to search for the product they want to buy?
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How easily are users able to filter and find the product(s) they want to buy?
RESEARCH · UNMODERATED TESTING
Market Research
We collected marketing data and insights from 9 participants by a survey through a hosting platform, Prolific. Though the analysis of the data was out of scope for this particular study, we managed to collect early-onset themes and findings. However, there is an additional opportunity to further explore insights and recommendations. Lastly, from our consultation with the client, further research can be conducted to explore social media presence and expand clientele to schools and daycares as their number one sold product is lice.
Findings
Generally, the website received a bunch of positive feedback on the general look and feel of the website from some survey responses we collected using prolific
RESEARCH · MODERATED USABILITY TESTING
Identifying Current and New Customer Needs
We conducted 9 moderated user interviews (in person or via Zoom). These testing sessions targeted new and prospective users who have not utilized Isabella’s Clearly website.​
Participants profiles
We interviewed 9 participants (8 new users and 1 current customer) in addition to the participants who responded to the prolific survey. Keeping time constraints and client's needs in mind, we tested with two specific groups identified by age: Ages 18-26 and Ages 27+.
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The goal was to test with new users who were primarily women. Before testing, we piloted with 1 user.
Interview Specifics:
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Prior to testing, we conducted a pre-study questionnaire to get a sense of participants' shopping behavior(s).
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Each session followed think-aloud protocols where participants were asked to perform a set of tasks based on a given scenario(s) that we developed with success criteria.
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An additional scenario involved a feature test for the sorting feature of products using a Figma prototype we created, followed by a post-task rating.
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Each interview concluded with a post-study questionnaire with additional ranking questions to quantify their experiences.
Tasks
We asked participants to complete the following tasks:
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Finding products within a certain budget on the live site
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Finding products within a certain budget on the Figma prototype
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Editing the cart (swapping out an existing product for a new product in the cart)
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Searching for products using the search bar
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Checkout process
ANALYSIS · AFFINITY MAPPING
Finding themes through thematic analysis
We broke down the user transcripts into stickies on FigJam and affinity-mapped all 9 participants’ responses. By using our findings from the heuristic evaluation as a guide and collating those with user testing sessions, we grouped similar issues into categories and identified priority/most commonly occurring areas for improvement.
FINDING #1
Users took a moderate amount of time to look for products
All participants spent a moderate amount of time scrolling through available products to find the items they were looking for on the Shop Page due to the lack of product categorization, filtering and sorting.
Design Recommendation:
Provide a feature to sort and filter products so that users, especially new ones, can find products quickly and easily.
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Long-term: Evaluate the information architecture of the current categorization of the Shop page. Consider subcategories and integrate similar filtering and sorting capabilities into blog posts.
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FINDING #2
Blog posts are returned as search results causing confusion and abandonment of finding products
The search function is unintuitive and does not meet user expectations. New users expected a list of relevant products to be returned when utilizing the search bar feature, but it currently returns a list of blog articles.
Design Recommendation:
Enhance the search function to return relevant products with prices.
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Long-term: Consider implementing smart search capabilities with real-time returns before selecting the ‘enter’ key that includes suggestions as a long-term goal.
FINDING #3
Multiple steps to check on the subtotal of items in the cart
All participants had to revisit the checkout page that opened up on a new page multiple times to view the subtotal of items adding on additional time. Given that we presented scenarios for participants to shop for three products under $60, it is inconclusive as to whether it is a practiced workflow for current or prospective customers.
Design Recommendation:
Consider a way to display one’s subtotal next to their cart icon while shopping (maybe within a cart pop-up).
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Long-term: Consider implementing smart search capabilities with real-time returns before selecting the ‘enter’ key that includes suggestions as a long-term goal.
FINDING #4
Discount codes did not go through / Additional major findings
The current user reported that their coupon codes received in the mail with their order were invalid upon checkout with a new order. Although this only affected one participant, it is important to note that other participants were new users and had never placed an order before.
Design Recommendation:
Validate codes and discounts before shipment and implement recommendations from Findings 1 with a search and sort feature. Consider additional market research on the younger demographic for future work.
FINDING #5
Repetitive labeling makes it harder to distinguish and identify specific products on the Shop Page
New user participants found it challenging to discern products and find specific products
Design Recommendation:
Removing “Clearly” in front of each product title, not capitalizing the entire name for easier readability, and adding subcategories to the existing categorization of the site.
Design Improvements
Coming Soon!
REFLECTIONS
What went well
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Testing sessions went rather smoothly
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We received positive feedback from a current customer
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Positive client interactions and meetings!
Moving forward
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Working with a larger sample size that is not a convenience sample may lead to more representative results and insights, including existing customers.
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There is an opportunity to collect further market research from the younger demographics that Isabella’s Clearly would like to target as they seem to be the most critical with feedback.
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In regards to usability, if presented with a longer timeline, we would have liked to explore mobile usability and accessibility.