Sofa U Love
While consumers typically like to purchase furniture in person, they are warming up to purchasing furniture online as furniture sales made up 12% of overall retail e-commerce sales in the United States in 2019.
Roles: UX researcher, UI/UX designer
Duration: 2 week sprint
Tools: Sketch, Google Suite, Post-its, Index Cards, Pen and Paper
The Challenge
Sofa U Love is a local furniture store with several locations operating in the Los Angeles area since 1971. While Sofa U Love offers a wide selection of quality furniture, its e-commerce website is challenging to navigate, lacks an efficient product search process and has an unconventional checkout process.
The Solution
Simplify and reorganize the website’s information architecture to create an effective and familiar product search process, and redesign the purchase flow to eliminate any points of friction and difficulty.
The Process
RESEARCH & DISCOVER
I first began my research by conducting a heuristic evaluation of the existing Sofa U Love website to identify key usability issues. Most of the violations resided within the search and purchasing processes, affecting efficiency and learnability for a user.
No consistent search bar placement: Efficiency
No consistent behavior when adding items to cart: Learnability
Shopping cart fixed at the top after adding items: Learnability
Too much information to enter in at once at checkout: Efficiency
Once I had a basic understanding of which areas of improvement to focus on, I familiarized myself with what direct competitors and aspirational competitors were offering in the online furniture shopping space. By doing a competitive & comparative analysis, I was able to hone in on which shopping features were missing from the Sofa U Love website.
I conducted 5 user interviews and task analyses to understand a user’s pain points with the site and gained further insight on what their expectations were from previous online furniture shopping experiences.
After the interview process, I synthesized the data and defined behavioral patterns through affinity mapping.
From that, I was able to distill the following key points and potential solutions:
1. Users had difficulty in browsing and narrowing down their product searches due to the repetitive and misleading categories and subcategories → this could be alleviated with better filter features and having a consistent search bar experience throughout the website
2. Users have a hard time visualizing what the piece of furniture would look like in their homes → having different product views would help alleviate that
3. Users did not know what colors or fabric choices were available for each product → clarify product descriptions
4. Users were not confident in what they chose → adding in customer reviews would add another layer of trust and validation
Meet Fran
To inject more empathy within the design process and focus my design decisions, I created a persona that was a representation of the research that I did and combined all of the user insights, needs and frustrations.
Keeping Fran in mind, I created a journey map to document her shopping and purchasing experience with the Sofa U Love website. This mirrored the current pain points discovered from my research.
After getting a better understanding of where pain points are located throughout Fran’s journey, I revisited the list of features to add from the C&C analysis and created a feature prioritization chart that would address the key issues that currently troubled users.
One of biggest pain points was the nestled subcategories and finding specific products on the website. To better understand how to untangle all of this, I created an existing site map to see what the current information architecture looked like.
Afterwards, I conducted 6 closed card sorts, writing existing major item groups on index cards and had users organize them underneath the categories I created on post-its. This exercise allowed me to not only confirm that the categories I selected made sense, but it also highlighted what users were expecting to see within a global navigation.
From that, I redesigned the site map and made sure to include best sellers within each sub-category so that new users to the site, like Fran, could see which items were popular.
Another big paint point was within the checkout flow where users could potentially receive an error without a clear resolution and exit the site. To alleviate this, I redesigned the user flow to break down the checkout process and minimize information overload.
IDEATE & DESIGN
Now that I redefined the user’s problems and expectations, I utilized the new site map, ideas from the competitive & comparative analysis and info from user interviews to sketch out low-fidelity wireframes of the redesigned site.
Test & Iterate
I conducted 3 usability tests with a paper prototype to receive user feedback in a timely and low-cost manner. With minor changes, I moved forward with designing medium-fidelity wireframes in Sketch and prototyping with InVision.
Medium Fidelity
With the clickable prototype, I conducted 10 usability tests and tweaked the design with each test. Most notably, I refined the order process flow to include an order summary within each step of the cart and broke down the payment process further.
Next Steps
Products will need to be tagged on a metadata level in order to start building the filtering features for color, material, size, price and style
Include “related items” section and “similar items” section to help with up-selling
Start collecting user photos and user reviews to build up credibility
Look into offering more shipping options
Measure website traffic, exit points and times after website redesign
Reflection
Through conducting multiple usability tests, I learned how to differentiate between a user’s opinion and an actual usability issue in order to decide which iterations to make for further testing.
I also learned about e-commerce design patterns and the importance of maintaining these patterns to facilitate usability on a new site.