Timeline
February - April 2023 (5 weeks)
Team
Phat Nguyen, Anita Morales, Kacey Sedillo, Munkhkhuleg Tserenpurev (me)
My Role
User Experience Designer
Problem
Millennials have a hard time finding their correct shoe size, accurate fitting, and photos of shoes from different angles when buying shoes online.
According to Hubspot’s 2023 State of Consumer Trends, millennials are the top generation to prefer buying through an online retailer. However, online shopping sometimes cannot give a thoroughly interactive experience, which leads them to have a hard time finding their correct shoe size, accurate fitting, and photos of shoes from different angles. Therefore, there was a question of how to make the purchasing experience easier, quicker, and more enjoyable.
Research
Foundational Research:
Instant gratification makes a difference in the purchasing experience.
During the brainstorming process, I started to list out the cons and pros of both in-person and online shopping in order to see what makes the difference in the purchasing experience. Therefore, I drew a conclusion from the biggest advantage of the physical store, which is instant gratification, to incorporate into our solution.
Competitive Analysis:
The competitors’ AR feature is not fully functional…
That being considered, me and my teammate, we analyzed the 3 most industry-leading e-commerce apps. We found that only two of them had an augmented reality (AR) feature, which was not fully functional, and not every product was accessible with this technology. This then became our team’s area of improvement.
User survey:
75% of participants prefer to buy shoes online when there is an augmented reality (AR) feature.
Even though our team saw what might be necessary to implement, I wanted to understand more about our target audiences and their needs and preferences. Hence, I asked 10 questions from 35 participants and highlighted 4 main topics in our survey:
Online purchase frequency
Users’ use of techniques/features
Difficulties with e-commerce apps
Technological preferences
As a result, I saw that around 75% of participant prefer to buy shoes online if there is an augmented reality (AR) feature because they found it as a tool to improve their shopping experience.
Semi-structured interviews:
Non-functionality makes the AR hard to use.
After the survey responses, I wanted to focus more on user pain points, so I got 3 participants who did a semi-structured interview with me. During the interview, I asked them to do tasks like browsing, searching, and using the AR feature to try shoes on, which they found not very usable.
Solution
Interactive experience is important in online shopping.
Analysis
3 main insights from the research.
Therefore, collecting all the survey answers and interview notes, I created an affinity mapping, which categorized user’s needs into different topics and gave us 3 main insights about our users.
Persona:
This is the persona, representing our target users.
Customer Journey Mapping:
Considering our research insights and persona, I made a customer journey mapping, which highlighted pain points and opportunities for improvement.
Design
Low-fidelity wireframes
Final design
You can check the prototype here:
Reflections
Reduce the scope of the problem statement. Since there is no single design that solves every problem I understood that having too broad problem hinders focusing on significant parts, which, in turn, prevents the team from having a common understanding of the problem. Therefore, it is significant to narrow down and pick the important one that meets the target users’ goals. That way, categorizing the problems first and prioritizing them would be a good foundation for further design processes.
Have as many as possible solutions for the design. During the ideation phase, I realized it never goes wrong to have more design options to experiment with because there are always some ways to sort, at least, good parts of each of them, which I can include in the final design. Moreover, I understood that having more solutions just gives more room to be creative.
Next Steps
I would research the possibility of adding more designs and incorporating other advanced features in addition to AR because these enhancements would provide users with a more interactive and immersive experience with the application. By integrating these advanced features, we can significantly improve the overall user experience of online shopping, making it more engaging and enjoyable. Moreover, this approach could lead to increased user satisfaction and retention, ultimately driving the success of the platform.