vi.

SOFTBABY

Branding / Research / UX
04-27-18
Collaborative Project

HOW DO YOU CONVINCE YOUR PARENTS TO BUY YOUR BABY CLOTHES?

SoftBaby is an infant clothes e-commerce website that had a problem generating sales on their website.

I was brought on to improve the user experience of SoftBaby. I was tasked to raise sales conversions and lower the initial homepage bounce rate. I began this process with extensive research about parents and others who buy baby clothes. From that research, I created insights that informed our re-design to make the site more appealing and intuitive. After creating these designs, I tested these new versions with usability testing as we moved into high-fidelity mockups.

While the project was completed with team of three designers, I lead the research section of the redesign and contributed to each part of the process from interviews to wire framing.

RESEARCH
As I explored how parents, and other baby clothes buyers acquire these products, I used a number of different research methods to inform our redesign:

Screener Survey: Screener surveys help to provide preliminary quantitative data and provide a source for user interviews.

Business Model Canvas: Usability testing of the existing SoftBaby website allows a designer to find out the current strengths and growth points of the current design.
User Interviews: User interviews provide qualitative data about user likes, dislikes, and pain points that can provide generative insights for the design phase.
Comparative/Competitive Feature Analysis: Comparative and competitive feature analysis allows one to examine the designs of competitors and those solving similar problems.
Website Usability Testing: Usability testing of the existing SoftBaby website allows designers find out the current strengths and growth points of the current design.
Competitor Usability Testing (Primary.com): Usability testing of a competitor helps a designer to understand the what works and could be improved from the designs of others in the industry.

I performed seven in-depth interviews on our target users. This provided insights into their common behaviors, pain points, goals, and needs helped us to create a stronger product in the design stage.

After collecting this large amount of data, I then looked to find the most effective, actionable insights from the completed research.

b.

ANALYZE
I then explored our research findings through different analysis methods including Affinity Mapping and Personas.

Figure 1. The affinity map of my findings from our user interviews. I categorized different facts and statements from the research into greater categories. From those categories I can create different user insights that focused the design.

Figure 2. Primary persona. Personas are created from user research to help designers emphasize with an "average" user. This way I could focus on the best solution.

Figure 3. Secondary persona.

With the following research, I formulated our problem statement:

Parents buying baby clothes want to hit the golden trifecta for their needs: affordable, appealing, and high-quality material. Sometimes this can require busy parents to tediously browse sites and stores with a crying child just to get prepared for the upcoming season.

How might we provide parents with a reliable source for cute, quality baby clothes that don’t break that bank?

c.

CREATE
After synthesizing our research, I ideated on some potential redesigns for the website.

User Statement

Design Insight

“I want quality clothes with appealing colors”

I created larger, more descriptive text and visuals of the product on a child.

“I mostly buy in bulk for my baby”

I created more visible sets for the user to browse

“I worry about ensuring a good fit”

I created product reviews with a fit scale to communicate how it runs large or small

“Social good isn’t a priority for me with baby clothes.”

I made the mission statement present but less emphasized

“I value brands for their consistency”

I created a stronger brand voice

I ultimately decided on the concept below.

Figure 4. Hand drawn wireframes for the screens of Task 1: "Add an outfit for a two-month old to the cart" The original design underwent a round of low-fi testing before finalizing on a layout.

Figure 5. The final wireframes for the same design.

Figure 6. Finalized prototype.

TESTING
By testing the design along the same parameters as the original website, I can examine how our redesign fares in comparison, and iterate on it further.

Figure 7. The results of third round of usability testing. This was my final round of testing of our hi-fi prototype that proved the improvement of my design on the original.

Moving forward I established some next steps:

As per industry standard, a company phone number should be added to the footer in a “Contact Us” section.
The hero image should click through to an existing About page or a page detailing the value of the product. This could come with a signifier of “Learn More” below the hero.
More icons could be added to certain repeated features of the product, like “Ethical Product” to increase delightfulness on the side of the user.
More research and testing needs to be done of the labels of products, as well as the filters and sort options for the site.

In my research, a distinction arouse between problems of the website (the messenger of the information to the user) and the product itself (the message). While I could address the symptoms of the problem in fixing the web presence of the company, the root of it could only be addressed with true product UX, something would need its own dedicated sprint and methods to address.

e.

REFLECTING

However, working in close communication with a client was a valuable experience. The ability to have a back-and-forth with a client was invaluable to have more brains in the project. It was a great experience to create a redesign that was more aesthetically pleasing, more intuitive, and more effective in creating costumer conversions.

VIEW RESEARCH REPORT