Compared to search, the browsing experience was underutilized within our mobile Best Buy app users
By revealing contextual browsing use cases, I built a browsing experience that engages customers and helps the scan-ability and discovery of our products.
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- Role
- Domain
- Responsibilities
- Date
- Design Intern
- Browse
- Discovery, Task Flows, Research, Personas, Journey Mapping, UX Validation, Execution
- 2019
The current browsing experience is not engaging users and enabling them to discover our products
• 10% of orders find products through browsing
• 63% of PLP page views this year (2019) were via search rather than browse
• 38% of users on the product tab navigate away
Between the app view (Left) and the small view on the web (Right), the small view performed slightly better. This may be due to the added icons making it more visually engaging. However, this data may not be statistically significant to boldly make that assumption.
But first, a heuristic evaluation
WHAT WE'RE DOING WELL
Consistent and standard: Users have seen list-views like this before and can expect the same visual treatment no matter how deep you go in the flow.
Aesthetic and minimalistic: All text serves a purpose and the minimalistic list view allows users to hone in on finding their relevant categories.
WHERE WE CAN IMPROVE
Flexibility and ease of use: Solely relying on text doesn't provide the same consistent experience across different cultures and people who speak different languages.
Recognition rather than recall: Using only text decreases desire to read and engage with content. This design makes it harder to see what altitude you're at in the flow and lacks intention in how we want to present categories.
Our competitors lean into visuals and inspiration as a way to discover categories and products
I performed a competitive analysis of seven companies to assess how their strategic approach is allowing their user base to have a good browsing experience.
I wanted to answer the question of: how does their approach bring value to customers?
Our customers browse when there are new product releases, major life events, and times of urgency
I wanted to understand who our users were before diving into what would bring value to them. I scoured through validation research done in the past that included contextual interviews of recent buyers of priority products and research on shopping journeys for all major categories.
WHEN DO USERS BROWSE?
• New products. This means when new versions of the product come out or seeing others using it would motivate people to browse.
• Life events. This includes moving and remodeling a new home that they just bought or having a new addition to a growing family.
• Urgency. This usually means when an item fails and needs to be replaced or when holidays are coming up and there are limited-time deals available.
WHY DO USERS BROWSE?
• To solve the problem. If a user buys a new television they might encounter a problem of connecting it to other devices or mounting it.
• To learn everything they can. In fear of making a mistake, they ask others for their opinions or do the research themselves.
• To look for reviews they can trust. Many people have a "show me" attitude and look for real experiences from real people. They want to see product issues that they care about.
• To narrow their options. They want to move from the discover to the shopping phase. This includes allowing users to track their progress and filter out key criteria.
Greg is a persona going through a major life event – becoming a new father
Category Greg's persona is the personification of all the research I synthesized. A persona helped me and other partners to relate to contextual browsing experiences in the real world and rally stakeholders around a common story and it's pain points. Knowing Greg's story will allow me to map out his experience later on in order to pinpoint design opportunities.
Greg's journey helps us pinpoint a few opportunities to improve his browsing experience shopping for baby tech
In order to reveal where opportunities where Greg's story can be improved, I mapped out his shopping journey. In order to introduce areas where design can improve Greg's journey I made a journey map to highlight important milestones and assessed where his frustration lives within the map. From there, I can make design requirements to begin exploring.
Hypothesis
How might we make categories more scannable for customers to find relevant categories and narrow down their product options?
I explored different layouts with the goal of skimming categories easier
These were some of many card iterations to decide which display would make it easiest for users to scan through categories using real product images to aid recall and recognition. I proposed the last iteration as the bigger and simple one column cards were easier on the eyes to scan through.
I also played around with different image treatments to aid recognition of categories
I iterated upon different image displays within the card design to see how different styles and colors might aid in visual engagement and recognition/recall. However, we quickly scratched this idea out as we needed a scalable solution to refresh images over time without having to do so manually.
As a customer digs into sub-categories, my focus was to bring a sense of visual hierarchy
I iterated upon different design layouts for deeper browsing flows while exploring visual hierarchy as a customer might go deeper into filtering into a category. Eventually, we had to scrap changes to these deeper browsing flows as it didn't make the cut for the MVP given the timeline.
Design impact
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The team behind the magic
👤 Franklin Huynh (UX Design Intern)
👤 Hayley Younghusband (Product Manager Intern)
👤 Nathenael Dereb (Software Engineer Intern)
