Uncovering Online Shopping Experiences
Client
An online Fashion and Catalog retailer that caters to the underserved customer groups
Time and Place
Based in Manchester and researching in Leeds and London
February - April 2018
Type
User Research . Service Design .
Customer Journey Mapping . Agile
Brief
Having been a leading catalogue retailer for many years, our client wanted to become a more Inclusive and Digital First retailer in order to compete against the top retailers in the online shopping industry.
Our client wanted a holistic and strategic approach to understand their customer’s expectations and needs to help them optimise their existing user experience across all channels, particularly digital.
Our Approach
Our team decided to create and develop an Experience Journey Map of their customer’s end-to-end shopping journey. Allowing us to provide a rich and comprehensive picture of the customer’s behaviour and a tool to help plan future business strategy.
The experience journey map focused in particular on uncovering and understanding the broader shopping experiences. Focusing especially on the decision making and different touchpoints (in particular the digital touchpoint) used by the customers when they interacted with one or more of the client's power brands.
My Role
UX Researcher
To build such a detailed experience map and capture meaningful business and customer need, the team worked simultaneously across two channels: The Research team to speak with and uncover the customer’s experiences and provide the Service Design team with the finding and insights to support the building of the experience map itself.
I was part of the two-man research team who spent time shadowing the client's call centre staff and conducted
in-depth interviews with 26 customers across three locations and also a manage a homework task as preparation.
Discovery Phase
Discovery
Research Aim
As part of the larger experience mapping project, the aim of the research was to speak with customers through qualitative methods. This was to ultimately uncover and understand the needs, motivation, goals and
pain-points for the customer across the whole shopping experience, including pre and post-purchase.
Discovery
Call Centre Shadowing
Spending two days shadowing call centre staff, we captured live interactions between the customer and our client over the phone, as well as on social media. Gathering information at this point of decision making allowed us to identify a broader range of questions, issue and barriers the customers faced.
Discovery
Homework Task
In preparation for the in-depth interview, I was responsible for creating and managing a homework task. We asked each participant to provide evidence of different purchases they had recently made.
Using whatsapp, participants shared images of items they had purchased from one of our client’s brands as well as an item from another online retailer. Having purchases from different retailers allowed us to cover a range of scenarios which we would later discuss with the participant later in the interviews.
This is the demo homework example we created to help the participants understand the task
Discovery
In-Depth Interviews
An intense four days of back to back research saw us speak to 26 customers in Leeds, London and Manchester. Although tiring, it was important for us to covered different locations and capture as many different perspectives as we could in order to avoid a location bias.
After a quick chat about the homework task, the majority of the 60-minute interview focused around the participant’s story of a recent purchase. This ranged from buying a pair of jeans, a dress for a 60s themed party and a last-minute Christmas Day outfit.
To capture the emotional highs and lows, we asked the participants to place emoji’s at the different stages of the story and explain why they felt that way. This worked out to be really effective, with participants finding it much easier to express how they were feeling with the aid of emojis as well as having a little fun.
Asking the participants to tell their story helped us to build a picture of context around the decision making and interactions with the different brands. Thus identifying the strengths and weaknesses of the digital experience, as well as the drivers and barriers to long term satisfaction and loyalty. It enabled us to gain some key research findings and uncover some rich insights to feed into the experience map.
A participant’s purchasing journey including emojis at the main decisions and touch points, showing how they were feeling at each stage.
Delivery Phase and Outcome
Outcome
Building Empathy between Business and Customer
As well as uncovering existing and new customer needs for the experience journey map, we also presented our primary research and customer stories back to the clients themselves during a workshop. Allowing them to hear first-hand experiences of what it was like to shop with them.
My fellow researcher and I presented back six participant journeys whom we felt represented the spectrum of all customers we spoke to.
Dividing the clients into groups of four, we provided each group with a customer story and asked them to read through and identify for themselves what they believed the customer’s needs were. After doing this they went on to identify different opportunities for the company to help address those customer needs.
Seeing the clients get involved with the customer stories during the workshop was really satisfying, especially as in later workshops when working on the main journey map the clients were referring to their customer’s experiences, rather than their own.
I presented some of our user stories during the stakeholder workshop
A digital example of a user story we gave stakeholders to help them identify customer needs and opportunities for the business
Outcome
Challenges and Learnings
Working as a researcher and supporting the Service design team create the experience journey map provided many challenges but also allowed me to build my UX knowledge and experience.
This is an article I co-wrote with my colleague who worked as a service designer on this project. We discuss the main lessoned learned while working on this project.