Duncan Hann

Back to Events

Event · 2017

Designing an Ecommerce Experience

An event focused on UX design principles and strategies specifically for ecommerce platforms.

Date
Venue
Huckletree Shoreditch

What I took away

Key takeaways

  1. Explored omni-channel strategies for integrating retail, subscription, and online shopping.

  2. Kurt Geiger shared UX challenges, emphasizing MVPs and user empathy through testing.

  3. Discussed A/B testing, analytics, and stakeholder engagement to improve ecommerce experiences.

From my notebook

My notes

Notes from the Event:

GRAZE: https://www.graze.com

  • DISCONNECT BETWEEN SHOP AND SUBSCRIPTION SERVICE
  • Omni-channel: Retail, Subscription, Online Shop

Rating system:

  • Disadvantage: Unusual to rate before trying

Crazy 8's: 8 ideas in 10 minutes - Project managers, developers, designers, etc. - everyone.

  • Question everything & challenge ideas
  • Reduction in rating system

KURT GEIGER: https://www.kurtgeiger.com

  • UX TEAM OF ONE - WORKING ON THINGS THAT HAD ALREADY BEEN DECIDED BY MARKETING. Worked closer with developers to show them what UX was. Asking why, why, why they were doing things. Liked by directors and a UXer was put into each product team.

  • Show user testing videos outside of UX. Show directors, show developers. Spreads empathy.

Encouraging the use of MVPs:

  • Get the developers seeing the users attempting to use the software.

User testing does not need to be expensive:

  • Budget for testing tight - built own testing lab.
  • Booked 2 meeting rooms:
    • One room for testing
    • One room for observation
  • Played back to stakeholders.

The business-friendly journey map:

  • Attach business goals to user goals - business likes retention, bounce rate, % AOV, % +sign ups. Measurable. (See photo)

  • Hypothesis, MVP

  • Get developers and marketing to buy in to the process.

  • Kurt Geiger built a multichannel app.

  • Fast deployments - constantly iterating.

  • Give customers a better experience by improving in-house systems.

  • Build systems in-house - better say in how omni-channel works.

Q&A:

  • Interesting that they say that the marketing team often fails to embrace UX and they struggle to work with them (Kurt Geiger). However, I do not have that issue. Convincing stakeholders through numbers also isn't an issue. It's purely the development brick wall which is frustrating. The limitations of the platform and the development backlog prevent front-end development. Agreed, not having a rigid platform like Magento offers more flexibility, but only when the development can handle the workload.

  • Ensure your analytics is working from the start to ensure you can validate what you're building.

  • A/B Testing - great tool for all UXers.

How to cope with opinionated people (stakeholders):

  • Really question why you want to do something. Find the problem or perhaps understand their issue in more detail. Get them to provide the proof for why the change is required. Provide data. It may be that by asking why they realize their issue isn't really a problem.

  • Kurt Geiger: Work in a team with UI designers who they'll work with to produce pattern libraries, etc. They do get involved with some UI but are keen to highlight the divide.

  • Kurt Geiger: 65% Mobile, 20% Desktop, 10% Tablet.

  • Always show in mobile first to stakeholders.

Guerrilla testing: Offer an incentive to customers - Kurt Geiger offered 20% off. Internally you might offer cakes/chocolate.

  • UXers in Kurt Geiger haven't yet got into the delivery, labels, delivery notes design, return labels, etc. UX is slowly filtering through the company.