Creating a seamless viewing and shopping experience to increase conversion and encourage return shoppers.
Design Challenge
Type: Collaborative Design Sprint
Duration: 1 Week (September 2022)
Role: UX/UI Designer
Tools: Figma
Overview
In partnership with a cross-functional team of data scientists, UX designers, and developers, the goal of this project was to collaborate and ideate on a solution to alter The Bay’s digital platform to increase conversion, encourage repeat customers, and decrease returned items.
Outline
1. Introduction
2. Problem Space
3. Research
4. Heuristic Evaluation
5. Re-Design Suggestions
6. Reflection
1. Introduction
A Quick Intro
Their Focus
A Quick Intro
In August 2021 the Hudson’s Bay split and named their online business The Bay, while its physical stores kept the full Hudson’s Bay name. The stores are the flagship brand of Hudson’s Bay Company, founded in 1670, the oldest and longest-operating company in North America.
Their Focus
The Bay is focused on being a digital-first retailer and has an assortment of products and categories including fashion, home, beauty, food concepts and more.
Outline
1. Introduction
2. Problem Space
3. Research
4. Heuristic Evaluation
5. Re-Design Suggestions
6. Reflection
2. Problem Space
Where do We Start?
Website Focus
Where do We Start?
The initial problem space was centred around the How Might We statement
“How might we alter our digital platform to further increase conversion, encourage repeat customers, and decrease returned items?”
To begin understanding this problem space we assessed whether or not we would focus our efforts for The Bay on their website or their app. As a group we decided to hone our focus on the website as we found through a survey that most of the users we interviewed had been shopping for products on their website.
Collections Page
Item Page
Website Focus
From there we decided to focus our design suggestions on the collections page and the item’s page as we found that users frequent these two parts of the website often. We assumed that a customer shopping for their product would click on items and be taken to a collections page and an item’s page to have a better understanding of what they will be getting in their product.
Outline
1. Introduction
2. Problem Space
3. Research
4. Heuristic Evaluation
5. Re-Design Suggestions
6. Reflection
3. Research
Let’s Get Some Info
User Objectives
Persona
Revising our How Might We
Let’s Get Some Info…
We conducted user interviews with 5 people to understand the needs, wants, and motivations of our users. Due to the time constraints we weren’t able to conduct in-depth interviews and insights but since the team involved in the challenge were also its users we were able to distill a few key user objectives.
User Objectives
Persona
After going over key findings on customer wants, I created a user persona with my UX teammates for our target user. This user would be a customer on The Bay website looking to purchase an item. Our target audience are individuals 25 - 50 years old with disposable incomes.
Let’s meet Elise…
a working professional from Ontario who likes to travel, which means she needs a variety of outfits and shops for products online, but is often overhwelmed with the vast array of options available to her.
Revising our How Might We Statement
In line with our customer objectives and understanding of the problem space the How Might We statement was refined to reflect these new developments in the challenge.
Outline
1. Introduction
2. Problem Space
3. Research
4. Heuristic Evaluation
5. Re-Design Suggestions
6. Reflection
Our Focus
Now combining our understanding of the problem space as well as our secondary and primary research in tandem with our time constraints we proposed a few redesign considerations to hand off to the developers on our team.
I will be highlighting the areas we focused on for our heuristic evaluation and the redesign considerations I proposed though I did get contributions from my other designers on the team for feedback.
4. Heuristic Evaluation
Our Focus
The Collections Page
The Item Page
The Collections Page
The Item Page
Item Page continued…
Outline
1. Introduction
2. Problem Space
3. Research
4. Heuristic Evaluation
5. Re-Design Suggestions
6. Reflection
5. Re-Design Changes
Design Changes
Design Changes
As highlighted on the slide, this is where we focused our design suggestions. These are the 5 key areas we looked at on the Collections page.
We wanted to use negative space to emphasize important detail so we opted to move the information about the Rewards to a eye-catching banner over the “shop by category” instead of having this repeated under every item description on the collections page. We found that this may cause a customer to have an irritating or negative experience and thought that we could implement intentional use of white space surrounding text and names as according to research, it can raise user focus by 20%.
We intentionally chose to make the wishlist icon stand out as we noticed that some of our users forgot that it was there. This also allows for an accessible view of the feature.
The price was moved up to the right side, to make use of space in the description under the item’s image.
This is what the revised design breakthrough looks like…
For more accessible and convenient navigation through the different items we increased the size of images and text on the collections page. Additionally, we moved the sort-by feature to the top righthand corner as users we interviewed noted that they usually expect it placed on the top right hand of the screen.
The star ratings were increased in size so that customers can quickly and easily see this information.
This is what the revised design decision looked like
Outline
1. Introduction
2. Problem Space
3. Research
4. Heuristic Evaluation
5. Re-Design Suggestions
6. Reflection
6. Reflection
3 Things I learned Throughout the Process
Things I Could Have Done Better
3 Things I Learned Throughout the Process
Things I Could Have Done Better
