05. APPLIANCE ecommerce
BUSINESS GOAL
Increase brand presence in a secondary market and increase sales through ecommerce
MY ROLE
Project Manager & UX Research Lead
TIMELINE (for research activities)
1 Months
Research goals
1. Identify by cross-referencing business objectives with user needs new features to introduce
2. Measure the actual impact of different functionalities from the user’s point of view
Project roadmap
01. Prioritization Survey
Remote unmoderated survey using Kano Model Framework
02. In depth interviews
Remote interviews to deepen and expand survey insights
My role
In this project I held two main roles, besides the operational one: project manager and ux research lead.
My main responsibilities were:
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ensure the project’s time and budget are met (after the project estimate has been made)
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guarantee high quality of the research work and of the insights that emerge
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maintain coherence and continuity with a parallel project of research and design on the same ecommerce and dialogue with the team of that project
Approach
The project was born as a spin-off of a redesign project of an electronics and electronomistics ecommerce of an energy manager.
The objective of this project was to identify, through qualitative and quantitative data, which new functionalities (identified by a benchmark conducted in the parallel project) could be introduce to increase conversions of products and services on sale and simplify the user experience.
The first step was to prioritize the functionalities emerging from the strategic and functional benchmark through a prioritization survey using the Kano Model framework.
Then 10 in-depth remote interviews were conducted afterwards. For the interviews, some competitor and comparable sites were used as a support asset to give participants a concrete experience with the features.
In addition, to prioritize the features, at the end of the interviews each participant was also asked to participate in a quick dot voting session conducted on the "Miro" tool.
Outcome
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The platform must become not only an e-commerce, but an advisor, the trusted store in which every additional service offered in the final price (e.g. installation) becomes a pampering experience for the customer and not an imposition. Furthermore the e-commerce can take on that role of "expert technician" to ask for advice and from whom to buy when complex products are needed
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Users aren’t looking for revolution but for security: customer care, refund, shipping above all
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Smart filter is the feature to support the exploration of the offer and to improve the site UX
4
"must-have" features identified, to be implemented with maximum priority
7
"should-have" features identified, to be implemented with medium priority
8
"nice-to-have" features identified, to be implemented with low priority
Reflection
The project gave me the opportunity to experiment with new research strategies and techniques, while at the same time giving me some lessons learned.
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The Kano Model is not well suited to test very innovative and complex features with which the user is unfamiliar. Their description lengthens and slows down a survey that already the framework itself makes very long, increasing the risk of response set. In these cases, a solution may be to use a more qualitative research method (such as interviews) or include short videos in the survey that show the functionality used
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In interviews, using other sites as a support asset helped to get concrete feedback on possible future features, but if the example site had UX issues these would pollute the feature’s feedback. In this case a solution I will try in the future is to use a lo-fi or mid-fi prototype to focus the user only on the functioning of the feature.