System Usability Scale
I began by thoroughly reviewing all the collected notes and then started my process to document and compile any questions I had or could anticipate. Here is a few examples of some questions that I came up with
What is the current conversion rate?
What are the current amount of checkout steps to be completed?
What is the cart abandonment rate?
What's our biggest obstacle from a tech standpoint?
How many users created accounts vs used our guest checkout flow?
One thing that I really wanted to dive into first was to look at any current data points that I could find. We didn't have any software tracking this so I had to work closely with the dev team to get any info that I needed.
To this point in the initiative the only customer feedback had been from customer service pulling in any request or complaints that they had received. So I started to connect with some and dive deeper.
Drawing on my previous experience in e-commerce, I knew some best practices on checkout experiences. I wanted to take that while also looking more at the fabric industry itself.
A long average time spent on checkout pages
Lower mobile conversations
Old UI confused customers
Not accessible
Too many distractions along the way
Far to many customers were using the guest flow because creating an account took to long
We didn't have the preferred payment method for some customers
Below 1% conversation rate
83% cart abandonment rate
Below are a couple of examples of challenges that I had to solve for along the way. In any project your going to have some challenges along the way and I want to give a little insight into how I managed to navigate them.
User vs Business Needs
A business ask from the start was to remove our guest flow and make users create an account. My recommendation after reviewing the data and talking with customers was to not remove the guest flow but make it more subtle and also to give the ability to create an account after their purchase.
Technical Limits
Another challenge that I encountered was the old framework our cart and checkout were built upon. This took a lot of collaboration and brainstorming with engineering. not remove the guest flow but make it more subtle and also to give the ability to create an account after their purchase. purchase.
Customer Relationships
One challenge I faced during the process was building customer trust and relationships. While relationships may not be as crucial in e-commerce as they are in B2B, they still add value. To foster this, I ensured that every customer touchpoint included an opportunity to engage with our product team for feature enhancements and improvements.
My Usability Sessions
Key learning. Create an extensive design partners list to help build relationships and efficiency with customer calls.
Key learning. Customers have their own agendas so making sure that my sessions are well structured and focused is important.
Results. Overall this initiative was a success by the metrics that we had set out for. Bringing our conversion rate up by 3%, our cart abandonment rate down 14% and our guest checkouts decreased by 40%. This was all within the first 3 months of release.