PRODUCT: Responsive website
Role: UX REsearcher and designer
Year: 2019
The Client:
Hurtig Lane is a Barcelona based, vegan watch brand that believe no animal should suffer for the sake of fashion. Offering animal-friendly watches with bands created from vegan leather, stainless steel mesh and nylon tweed. They combine style, function and form in their fashionable watches that appeal to animals lovers world-wide. Most of their customers are vegan, care about the environment and follow current fashion trends.
The Challenge:
core KPI’s: Increase sales conversion and subscriptions
I was tasked to analyze Hurtig Lanes website and make suggestions on how to improve the overall usability as the client recognised there was room for improvement. The two main objectives we had were to increase the sales conversions and subscriptions. As the site is based on the Shopify platform, there would be some limitations to what could be updated within the bounds of the existing templates.
-Users tend to visit the Hurtig Lane website around 2-8 times before deciding to purchase a watch.
-On average 3-4% of customers add to cart, but only 1-2% go on to purchase.
-Industry average for fashion is around 2-3% sale conversion so the aim was to increase this to be in line with the norm.
The Result: Increased sales conversion by 25%
The client was happy with the findings and started to implement suggested changes to the website immediately. With the small changes that have been made so far we have already seen an increase of 33% of the amount of items added to cart, and an increase of 41% in people reaching the checkout. This has resulted in an increase in the monthly sales conversion rates by 25%.
My process: Discover > Define > Ideate > Test
Discover
Method: Heuristic evaluation
The first step was to run a heuristic evaluation of the existing site to identify what was working well and where people might potentially come across usability issues. I found the testing criteria on David Travis' course on usability reviews incredibly valuable as his techniques blends Nielsen's heuristics with other sets of guidelines, like ISO’s 7 dialogue principles, Shniederman’s 8 golden rules of dialog design and Tog’s 16 principles of interaction design. This included reviewing the site against 250+ usability maxims.
Method: Usability Testing
To test out my assumptions of where the possible pain points lay, I focused on the following tasks: I conducted usability tests on 5 participants. They were all female, between the age range 18-36 and either vegan, vegetarian or conscious-living inclined. Each test ran for 45-60 minutes where participants were asked for general impressions of different pages and also to complete core tasks. Some examples of the tasks given are to:
Purchase a watch: You feel like spoiling yourself to a new watch that you can wear to special events. Find the perfect watch that you would be interested in purchasing and go through the motions to purchase it.
Search for products and information: Find a present for your partner's birthday. You know they like dark colours. Work out the quickest route to narrow down your options. Because of the short notice you want to check that the watch will reach you in time.
Subscribe to newsletter: You have recently become a vegan and want to learn as much as you can about others that are already vegan. You like the product and want to be alerted in case of any discounts.
Define
Method: Affinity Mapping
Having both the information from an extensive heuristic evaluation and the 5 testing sessions, I was bombarded with insights. To make some sense of this, a quick round of affinity mapping helped see which users were experiencing the same issues. The common pain points were categorised according to the impact they would have on our KPIs (sales conversions and signups). There were also plenty of additional unexpected findings along the way. For instance, load times were not ideal, bugs were discovered and the ‘About us’ area wasn’t as transparent as testers would have liked.
The first round of affinity mapping. Each colour represents a different tester making it easy to identify common issues.
Tip: Post it notes don’t stick well to cold glass. But the heaviest ones were generally the most important so you’re looking at some nuggets of gold here.
Ideate and test
The Menu: 4 out of 5 testers were getting stuck on the main menu
The main menu was the most popular choice for testers to start the search for a watch. Testers would select Shop>Women>All Women>Collection. Having to click through this flow was difficult as the menu was super responsive and disappeared unless you followed your flow carefully. Some insights that presented themselves:
-Testers did not understand that the 8 watches shown in the menu represented each collection.
-Testers failed to notice the first option was actually a shortcut to displaying all women’s watches as most were more visually oriented and skimmed over the wording.
-There were too many options on the main navigation menu that were not focused on helping the user to find a watch.
-Testers were only mildly curious about the Ambassadors, all seemed to intuitively understand that clicking on the Brand would take them to the home page.
Where we started:
The original menu showed one option to view all Women’s watches as well as each individual collection. With the different format in photo, some users did not understand that this option displayed all of the available watches and that the 7 products above were the only watches available.
Where we are now:
The navigation options in the header menu were updated to have shortcuts that led directly to Men’s and Women’s and non-essential links, such as Home and Ambassadors were moved. The collections were then reduced to highlight featured watches and a more prominent option to shop for all watches was introduced.
Sort options: All testers expect to narrow the selection by colour
5 out of 5 testers were frustrated with not being able to sort or filter watches in a meaningful way. This actually prevented two of the testers from completing a purchase. Some insights discovered were:
-The expectation was that there would be a way to search by colour specifically, with some users preferring to look by material or dial/ strap type.
-Without a usable sort feature, testers were confronted with 5-7 pages of products. Only one tester went through all pages.
Where we started:
The sort options were also placed to the site of the menu which threw the centre justified page out of alignment.
Testers were not familiar with collection names. Price and date did not play a big role in the selection process. These options were no meaningful to the testers.
Where we are now:
Users now have the option to filter with more relevant options. Appearing at the top of the page, we centred and aligned everything to fit in with the minimalist aesthetic. Useful and stylish.
Shipping: Everybody loves free shipping
Each of the interviewees loved that there were no hidden costs and international shipping was not only fast, but totally free. This was right up there with their love of animal pictures in the site. Adding value propositions have been proven to help drive sales and this was a feature that people might not see until after they arrived at the product descriptions page. I proposed adding a small banner to the top of the home page to show this off. I’d love to do some additional AB testing on the wording to see how people respond.
Where we started:
Before we began this project, there was no mention of shipping on the home page.
Where we are now:
With the added value proposition.
And how this appears when scrolling through the site.
The content: People are more motivated to purchase when they feel good
A big draw for Hurtig Lane customers lies in the knowledge that their products are ethical. People feel good knowing they are making animal friendly decisions. This was highlighted in the original website, however not from the most inspiring angle. Each of the testers interviewed were vegan or vegetarian and responded to this in different ways, but none felt the immediate urge to make a purchase when being confronted with the grim realities of the industry. I proposed replacing this with something more positive that emphasized the impact buying a watch would make, additional AB testing on how this is phrased would be ideal.
Where we started:
Some shocking realities. While we removed this from the home page, you can still find this if you’re interested in reading more in the Peta pages.
Where we are now:
Her we focus on something friendlier and more approachable.
Subscriptions: All Testers want an incentive to sign up
Putting the subscribe option in the footer seemed to be intuitive for all of the testers. But it was hard to convince them to sign up without showing the value this would give. Aesthetically, there was also room for improvement looking at the layout of the footer overall. The information wasn’t aligned to any clear grid making it seem disorganised and some sections could be combined better like the shipping and returns.
Where we started:
The original subscription field had no value proposition and was contained in a footer that was off-balance and disorganised.
Where we are now:
How cool is this? We moved the subscription field to just above the Footer and highlighted the value this would serve the users.
Reflections:
It was great working in such a small team as once the data was collected we could work Lean and move fast. This project helped me to develop my skills conducting Heuristic evaluations and get much more comfortable with user testing. I recommend the usability courses of Udemy that David Travis has as this helped guide me in greater complexity that I had gone before. Not being familiar with the Shopify platform, it was really interesting working within the technological constraints of the templates.
Achieving a 25 percent increase in sales conversions meant I was absolutely thrilled with the result. There is also plenty of room for additional improvements in future to push this much further. :)
May the work continue!