Claudia


Do you know GREATS shoes? Back in October 2019, this e-commerce deserved a redesign, and I needed some practice with usability testing. Over the last year, the style was often chosen over UX on the live website. Instead, I focused more on usability and consistency in the following case study.



↓ Discover how I improved GREATS



Overview






DETAILS

MA case study

2019

3 months (1-2 day/week)






DELIVERABLES

​Accurate recommendation

Hi-Fi redesigned main pages

Interactive prototype

A/B evaluation

Detailed report






TEAM & MY ROLE

Data were collected as a group (UX students), the rest of the project was carried on individually.



Problem



Greats Brand Inc. is a footwear e-commerce that offers a narrow range of premium, Italian-made sneakers at accessible prices. With a key target customer of millennials, its website currently underperforms against 5 e-commerce considered for this case study. Our brief was to work as a group of five researchers to conduct a usability assessment of the website, then split up and work individually to redesign the site, improving the user experience.



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Process



Discovery



USABILITY EVALUATION

​We performed a total of three assessments:

1. Heuristics (Nielsen’s, 1944)

2. Satisfaction (expectation measure, think-aloud protocol, SUS)

3. Performance (task time, task success, errors, lostness)


A key user journey was identified and broken into distinct tasks considering top tasks for fashion e-commerce calculated from a survey on 74 participants. We asked users to complete the tasks in a controlled environment.



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Synthesis



FINDINGS

​​The usability evaluation revealed many issues that were triangulated and subsequently prioritised using MoSCoW method (Must, Should, Could, Won't).



SHOULD BE ADDRESSED

On the home page, contents are not relevant to the customer, they should enhance the brand. During satisfaction assessment, users suggested highlighting Greats’ commitment to the environment.



MUST BE ADDRESSED

  • The website gained a 'marginal' SUS score of 65.4
  • 72% of 'think out-loud' comments recorded during the test were negative
  • Users are 'lost' (0.53 lostness) and not able to perform a task one out of five times (80% task success)
  • Usability issues found unclarity on shoe size, text located above images resulting with poor contrast ratio, lack of labels for colour impaired users
  • Other key issues included misleading category labels, confusing navigation, lack of filters, and style inconsistency


Prototype



INSPIRATION

​Firstly, I undertook a quick research about how competitors deal with some of the issues, added some screenshots and notes to my logbook on OneNote.



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ROUGH SKETCHES

After this, I did some rough sketches to organise my thoughts. Some elements, such as filters, required more thoughts, therefore I separately sketched the possible variations of them and then just selected the version that was more relevant and consistent with the website.​



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INITIAL PROTOTYPE, HOME PAGE REASONING

  • The environmental commitment is displayed firstly, this will improve the brand image and help create new loyal customers.
  • A section displaying an existing promotion on the live website follows the 'shop now' one, in order to create additional value to the possible purchase.
  • A 'social proof' section including pictures from the page 'shop on Instagram' of the live website is added. Same applies for 'Top Picks' that is already displayed on the original e-commerce.
  • All sections will be consistent with each other but their appearance will be varied to classify them according to the similarity principle (Gestalt).


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Evaluation



SATISFACTION & PERFORMANCE

I involved a sample comparable to the initial evaluation, in the same environmental conditions. In order to gather descriptive insights into how users are satisfied with this first redesign of Greats website, I used both satisfaction and performance metrics.


ITERATIONS

I iterated the process. Therefore, I fixed the redesign, prototyped it, conducted user testing, and identified issues for a further redesign (that has not been required from the assignment) with the same modalities as above. Changes made will be more explicit in the 'Outcome' section.



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Outcome



PROVE THE VALIDITY OF THE REDESIGN WITH A/B TEST

I conducted an A/B evaluation (between the last iteration and the live website). Improvements in the analysed areas demonstrate that the website is now more competitive and the redesign could help Greats company to increase their revenue. Among other

  • The website gained a 'marginal' SUS score of 65.4
  • +44% of 'think out-loud' of positive comments recorded during the test
  • Lostness was dramatically reduced (-0.45)
  • Users can complete fully the task given (100% task success)


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FINAL PROTOTYPE

​The final prototype is available at this link: https://vlcj5e.axshare.com/#id=r08lhb&p=home&sc=1&dp=0&fn=0&g=1 (please, scale to width).


Otherwise, just watch this video:



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Let's do something great together!






claudiasabb.design@gmail.com

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