B|C Furnishings- a UX Case Study
Overview
Online shopping has witnessed a steady growth worldwide. The 2020 global pandemic has only increased this demand. If companies do not adapt and provide their customers with a positive online experience, their revenue will certainly decline. According to the U.S. Federal Census Bureau, total global online retail sales have nearly doubled from 2015 to 2019. Statistics tell us in the next four years, 22% of all retail sales will come from online shopping.
Goal
Design a desktop website that presents a clean, personalized experience for its users when shopping for furniture online.
Team & Role
My team consisted of myself and another UX designer. We collaborated on the research phase and up through the user story mapping process. From there, we split up the wireframing process using Figma. I designed the landing page, product pages, and inspiration pages. My team member designed the checkout flow and the Chat with a Designer feature.
Process
I believe in adapting what is useful and not recreating the wheel so I used Jesse Garrett’s expertise on the UX process. His 5 steps give intention to every decision during the design process. It also ensures “no aspect of the user’s experience with your site happens without your conscious, explicit intent.” With this strategy in mind, we were off to create our furniture website.
Step 1: Strategy
Making a list of assumptions about the possible experiences users are having when buying furniture online helped us look into what might be missing and what questions we needed to ask during user research. We wanted to pinpoint the exact problems our users were experiencing throughout the entire journey of searching, finding, and buying furniture online.
User Research
I wanted to reach as many people as possible to discuss and discover how their unique experiences have shaped their past actions when shopping for furniture online. We created a Google survey which we posted online with the questions we needed answered. We received over 40 responses to this survey. From the data we received, we picked a total of seven people to interview over the phone. This process was during a pandemic so meeting people face to face was out of the question. With these surveys and interviews, we found our unique experiences and solutions.
Big questions I wanted to know:
- What hesitations have you found when shopping for furniture?
- What are some reasons you have shopped for furniture online instead of in-store?
- Where have you gone in the past to find inspiration when buying furniture?
- Have you ever had to assemble your own furniture from online shopping? If so, how was your experience?
- Have you returned furniture from an online purchase? Discuss your experience and the process you had to go through.
- Do you trust a website to give you all the necessary information to complete a furniture purchase?
- What are the two most important things you consider when furniture shopping?
These questions were helpful when trying to understand the unique experiences of each of our users.
Insights & The Bottom Line
These are a few of the insights into how users might be feeling from the interviews I conducted:
Here are the main reasons for users using online websites for furniture shopping: time saver, larger selection, the specificity of the product’s detail, and the convenience of shopping at any time of day. Main reasons why users do not shop online for furniture: shipping hassle, past product purchases that didn’t match the online image, and experiencing the product in their actual living space.
Step 2: Scope
Being able to identify the issues and conveniences users were already experiencing helped us develop our persona, Bethany Scott. We created Bethany and gave her qualities resembling a nice medium of all of our interviewees into one ultimate user. Her goals and frustrations also reflect the combined perspectives of our user’s wants and struggles.
Key Objectives
The key objectives we focused on when furthering our building process: identifying sales clearly on our site, creating a space within our site where users can find inspiration and corresponding images, creating a filter feature focusing on accessibility, and creating a way where the user can visualize the furniture in their home.
Challenges
The main concern people had when shopping for furniture online was mainly to do with shipping. If shipping was not free or was a hassle to return to the store, they would not purchase the product. This is definitely a challenge because at a UX level we have no control over pricing and how a product is shipped or returned to the company. Even though, as a UX designer, this is not my department, this would be useful information to communicate with other teams in charge of merchandising. Not keeping the research just in the design department but sharing these findings to others who have control over shipping costs and who need insight into this piece of the business puzzle would benefit the user.
Steps 3 & 4: Structure and Skeleton
Stepping into Bethany’s life was crucial at this point of the process. We wanted every design of our website to be intentional and each decision needed to come with Bethany in mind. Keeping her goals central helped us as we transitioned into creating a user story map. This is where we took all of Bethany’s goals and put them into points of action within our website. These goals again were finding furniture fitting a specific type of living space (measurements, accessibility, etc.), sticking to a budget, and finding quality furniture made to withstand her hectic lifestyle.
Goal #1: Furniture That Fits Your Lifestyle
Keeping the user’s first goal in mind we came up with a filtering system that would encompass each need we found through user testing. We knew they were concerned with the following points: allergies, pricing to stay on budget, and finding a way to measure durability and comfort.
User testing showed frustration when trying to search for inspiration on websites like Pinterest. They would find a photo they liked and tried to find the exact furniture to re-create the photo and would find a dead end. This is why we created an inspiration tab where the user could search through photos of fully designed spaces and click on each piece of furniture to buy and research more details. We wanted to alleviate the user's frustrations when looking for inspiration.
Goal #2: Sticking to a Budget
Users expressed an appreciation when shipping costs and the subtotal were not hidden until the very last checkout page. We wanted to make this easy for the user to access before they were ready to purchase their items. This is why we included a button on our product page for the client to enter their zip code, this helps generate an estimated shipping cost/delivery date for the user. We also made sure that on the very first checkout page, the user was receiving their subtotal before entering any personal information.
Goal #3: Finding quality furniture
With this goal in mind, we added a feature where the customer could order a swatch of the furniture’s fabric to visualize the texture and color in their personal space. This will also help our users to physically touch and see the durability of the materials being used. We also made verified-buyer reviews easy to find so users would feel reassured in the quality and color of each material. We also included a comfort and durability rating system in every product details section.
After the processes of user story mapping, site mapping, and wireframing. We went through a series of user testing with our prototype. During the prototype creation process, we found a lot of issues when creating tasks for our users. These issues included not having pages to notify the user they had completed a purchase/action. We also didn’t give simple ways for the user to add a product to their cart and then continue shopping where they had left off.
Step 5: Surface
The key message we wanted to portray when creating our style guide was high quality and trust. We wanted to accomplish this by clean and simple colors, typography, and not over cluttering the site with too much information. We chose black and white as our colors so they wouldn’t clash with any of the product images. If a bright colored sofa was on display we did not want our website to take away from the product, we wanted it to be complimentary. There is also a large list of items when a user hits the drop-down for our Furniture tab, so we needed a font that would be easy for the user to read, this is why we chose Helvetica.
As we finished creating our website in high-fidelity we again went back to user testing and made slight adjustments to our overall design. One of these changes was the spacing for our drop-down menus. Users had a hard time reading all of the items that were listed. We increased the spacing in sentence lines and letters. Giving more white space made it easier to read for our users.
Conclusion
In conclusion, there are three main takeaways I learned throughout this project. First, it is always beneficial to ask the right questions when interviewing users. If we had not made our assumptions list we would not have had the insightful questions we needed when performing our user research. Second, be intentional with your designs. I found that when I was experiencing a ‘creative roadblock’ it was simply because I was forgetting to keep the user in mind when mapping out my web pages. Asking the following questions when deciding to add a button or subsequent detail proved extremely helpful. How does this help our users? Is this backed by our research? Third, research the business and competitor's websites. In our case this was a non-existent company but researching other companies who are already in the business can help solve user problems and avoid reinventing the wheel.
UX feeds the curious and I am one curious user. Thanks for reading!
