Department Store APP UX Research

Intro

It's the project I participated in while working in UXI design agency. Our client is a well-known department store in Taiwan. To gain a better understanding of their customer needs to improve their current services, we conducted focus group user study to deliver research insights.

Methods: Desk research, recruiting, contextual inquiry, focus group, affinity digram, persona

My role: UX research assistant

‍Team: 3 UX researchers

Timeline: 4 months, 2020

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Conduct end-to-end user research to deliver a report

Since we're an agency, it's essential to clarify our clients requirements first to meet their expectations. We conducted the full user research process as below and delivered a report as the project outcome for our client.

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Define request: slowly progressing in digital customer experience

Our client has released an APP to develop their e-commerce service. The highlighted functions include mobile payment, member account, online store and restaurant reservation, etc.

However, the review rate of APP was only 3.7/5.0, which was a bit lower than the average compared to competitors. What's more, the number of members has been slightly increased for a long period of time. Since our client just released the online shopping service, they would like to discover what customers really care about and the feedback for current APP to improve their O2O services.

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Map out the situation by discover research

Familiar with current APP design functions and flows

To quickly get familiar with our client's APP, we drew APP's flow and highlighted the most important functions/pages. Besides, we evaluated the usability problems based on our professional perspectives to help us structure the interview guides outlines.

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Analyze the market of department store

We compared the member program, bonus offerings, and APP functions among different department stores in Taiwan. We found out that our client's APP is more likely positioned as multi-functions and personalized features. Although it provides diverse functions, such as online DM, shopping, mobile payment and so on; however, Eslite department store APP has performed the best in personalization with precision marketing.

We also studied some department store APPs from Europe or American, such as Selfridges, Harrods, and Macy's, to find out special features or innovative technology applied in their digital experience.

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Focus group interview

To interview users in several groups could help us collect a huge amount of qualitative user data more efficiently. As the research assistant, I was responsible for recruiting, and also supported contextual inquiry and focus group interview.

01 Recruit 4 types of interviewees by online survey

We had segmented four types of interviewees we would like to recruit, and with each type, there's different research goal according to their properties. We released a quick survey to recruit from the public and also from our client's members. After receiving 300+ respondents, we selected suitable interviewees by their shopping frequency, expense, member tier and experiences using department store APP in order to fit our research goal. Next, we conducted telephone interview to confirm their real experiences, occupation and oral expression capability.

02 Contextual inquiry in department store

In order to better understand the service situation of front-line staff, we went to the department store to experience online restaurant reservations, mobile payment checkout, commodity pre-order, and in-store navigation. We found out that the staff is not fully trained that they don't fully understand new functions or services, and online and offline information is not integrated perfectly.‍

03 Conduct 4 sessions of focus group interview

We divided in total 21 interviewees based on their properties into four interview sessions. I was in charge of recording the whole process in text and showing the slides of interview questions.

Interview guides include four sections:

-Personal experience shopping in department store

-Personal experience using APPs from different department stores

-Compare member program or VIP services among department stores

-Overall feedbacks for our client's APP, member program and services

04 Review insights with clients after each interview

After every interview sessions, we would arrange a meeting with our clients. During the meeting, the host would first brief about the types of each interviewee and the key insights from them. Next, we would discuss together and listen to the opinions from clients. In so doing, we could not only summarize out the key points from this interview, which is helpful for us while sorting out the data afterwards, but also to get a chance collecting our client's feedbacks from their business perspective, which allows us to know what they really care and their understanding of their customers.

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Transfer interview data into insights

Affinity Diagram to clearly figure out the most serious issues for users

After the interviews, we used tools such as Miro(the online real-time board) to visualize huge amount of user data into post-its, and then organize in multiple categories, including member program, homepage content, information architecture and user profile. Through out this process, we could sort out insights effectively, clearly comparing that what're the main problems many users had mentioned or which group of users actually had the similar feelings.

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Create Persona to provide an image of customer types

We clarified the needs of four types of persona based on 4 groups of interviewees to let our clients have an image of what kind of customers they're dealing with. For each type of persona, our client could take different marketing strategies to fulfill their needs and maintain the relationship with the customers. Regarding "Loyal customers", it's important to dig out the reason they like our company. As for "Price-sensitive users", they have the potential to be our online shopping customers if the services meet their needs.

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Hypothesis: not integrating online and offline services together affects customer experience

Overall speaking, the most critical issue is that the department store is unable to combine online and offline services together perfectly, which results in delivering terrible customer experience. Their APP should be positioned as an extension of original services rather than developed as an independent e-commerce system. The main two problems are shown below.

01 Shopping services (Preorder & Delivery)

Our client has provided products preorder or delivery services from its APP. However, the entrance to the functions isn't easily to be found, and even the operation is too complex to understand. What's worse, users have mentioned a scenario that the off-line staffs actually didn't know the reservation service that resulted in misunderstanding.

"The entrance for shopping is too difficult to find that I had only bought once. Never get to find it again." - user

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02 Member programs (Points, coupons & Deals)

For customers, they care most of member programs, for instance, which level they're in and what kinds of benefits they have. Also the points they had earned after each consumption, it's essential to realize how to use those points. However, these information and functions aren't clearly displayed on APP, some are even hidden under onlne shopping, which results in the situation that our client actually provide lots of benefits but users aren't able to utilize.

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Design suggestion: adjust APP structure

Based on the hypothesis, we had suggested a change in APP's current information structure. From Business perspective, our client wants to develop online shopping but it's difficult to be found, which is hidden behind lots of promotions, deals, redeems, etc. For customers, they actually care most of "Redeem" that they need to know how many points and coupons they have and what they can exchange to.

As a result, we suggested 3 design solutions:

1. To make online shopping function easier to be seen by changing the entrance name to "Shop online"‍

2. Separated preorder, delivery, and points redeem into 3 categories under online shopping

3. Display member programs & benefits information clearly under "My account"

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Follow-up (2021.11)

After the project has ended for one year, I found out that our client actually did implement our second suggestion. "Points redeem" is separated as an independent category!

*There's no english version for the APP; instead, the translation is shown by the arrow.

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Limits as a design agency

The worst challenge for us is being the role of a second party in this project. Firstly, we're unable to gain completed user data due to privacy issues; thus, it's difficult for us to get a whole picture or even more precise user patterns. We had to invest more efforts in researching. Secondly, although our client was satisfied with our report, they conducted the concept testing internally, and we couldn't see the next step if they do take our advices or not. There're plenty of factors which might affect their choice, such as company business goals, budgets, developing, etc. Nevertheless, it's my first time conducting focus group study which has indeed nailed my interview skills.