Initial objective

Within a tight budget, provide UX consultancy to improve responsive website usability and user experience.

Challenges and strategic impact

Despite the extremely tight budget constraints, I successfully coached the client on the value of UX, leveraging website data, and employing quantitative vs qualitative research for informed decision-making. I then:

• Recruited a junior UX team member to carry out a two-person expert review and analyse findings
• Worked with the product owner to identify their target users, then created some lean personas along with some use cases
• Utilised their website analytics to identify funnel drop-off points
• Mentored the product owner on the pros and cons of quantitative and qualitative research for richer insights, and set up an online survey
• Carried out guerilla usability testing with 5 participants for qualitative feedback

Expert review key findings

Below are select key findings from the Expert Review:

1. Their homepage lacked a clear proposition to indicate what FashionBloc offers.
2. Problematic information architecture and labelling – e.g. ‘Trending’ & mixed content of shoppable products with editorial content.
3. Problematic currency conversion functions on the product page & checkout page. The function was faulty and compromised user trust.
4. Inventory inaccuracy put people off – e.g. size only available in S, but sizes of M & others were still offered and users were presented with the ‘Buy’ button. This triggered error messages.
5. Payment details pages were long and laborious

The above findings were validated during user testing sessions. Richer findings were uncovered during the 5 usability testing sessions.

Deliverables

• Project direction/ roadmap
• Expert review findings
• Usability testing findings
• Wireframes (clickable wireframes to illustrate flow) / Designs for improvement

Project outcome

Fashion Bloc’s product owner eventually made plans to resolve the significant and serious issues identified in the expert review, supported by usability testing findings and analytics data. The longer-term plan was to resolve other issues further down the line in a gradual manner. 

At the point of my departure from the project, the product owner Ieva Zu was looking to invite a technical co-founder for the business, to shape the future of its website.