The Request
B-2-B-2-C is in itself very tricky. Do you market to the business you are selling to or do you market directly to your business’s customers? The experience is to be cleaned up for a more useful and direct communication from the business to the customer. The mobile experience is also broken, so the redesign needs to be structured towards cellphones.
They wanted the ability to send recommendations directly to customers, and provide them a way to self-checkout.
Basically, they want enhancements to the UI, new features, and their current shopping cart experience cleaned up.
My role in this project
Developer
User Researcher/Designer
User Interface Designer
Challenges
Create a new experience that is able to live on the current CMS platform. Meaning we were stuck in a contract with a vendor who would not let us do our own development on their custom theme.
Maintain the current brand style while cleaning up the edges and taking advantage of mobile integration and screen sizes and a primary media device.
All departments would need to be involved. From Marketing to international, from Legal to Customer Service.
Approach
For the UX research we would feedback generated from online heat maps, customer complaints (Hotjar) and requests to produce effective shopping experience for your products.
Add in required feedback by mock-testing prototypes with investors for the desired solution. This gave us insight to what features we wanted to display and when.
Research competitive analysis. We looked over what our competitors were doing and updated our mock-ups to reflect useful insights.
Solution
We started by sketching out a prototype using Adobe XD. We used the journey map and wireframes we’d built to bring to life what the mobile experience would feel like for the users. It was like a sneak preview of the post-practitioner recommendation journey.
We thought it through – before shooting off a recommendation to a customer, we made sure the cart was already filled up. This gave the practitioner the flexibility to either whip up a bundle for repeated use or choose to send it as a one-off recommendation. And to make things convenient, the recommendation could be sent over text, email, or even as a QR code that opens up a guest cart right on our business site.
We developed a ‘happy path’ for the new user experience and unveiled it at our national sales meeting – all before we kicked off the actual development. It was like a sneak peek into the future of our user experience, making sure we all had a clear, exciting vision of where we were headed.
Learnings
The ecommerce project was largely successful, yet it taught us some vital lessons. One of the key learnings was the importance of clarifying the requirements of an experience with all stakeholders prior to development. Our team encountered issues with our current e-commerce inventory software, making it difficult to generate carts efficiently and forcing us to switch e-commerce platforms.
The experience demonstrated that creating a proof of concept (POC) in development was pivotal in revealing what wasn’t possible with the existing platform. Despite challenges, this practical step saved us from investing more time and resources in an unfeasible direction.
Unexpectedly, we found that mobile usage was not as prominent as our attitudinal research suggested, a vital insight that will shape our focus in future projects. Interestingly, the most utilized feature upgrade was our solution for quickly adding products to carts without the need for diving into the product details. This emphasized the user’s desire for a streamlined, efficient shopping experience, a point we would take into account in future design and development strategies.
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Contact me
moore8577@gmail.com