Alzheimer’s Society E-commerce
The Alzheimer’s Society Online Shop sells assistive products to help people to live well with dementia and for longer in their own homes. Alongside this, the website sells a wide range of Christmas cards and gifts, branded merchandise, Society publications and books on dementia.
The goal:
• Helping users better understand the products, including their features, benefits and related advice.
• Ensuring that our USP is clear, in the context of the competitive landscape.
• Improving the way that VAT / VAT relief info and options are presented
• Any suggestions for more general improvements to the overall UX and UI of the shop
From the research:
Submerged with data from previous research, I have created new surveys sent to users after the checkout process and done a few user interviews with previous users/clients of the website.
After spending a few days putting together and going through the massive amount of data, my team and I came up with a few insights from the user and it was clear we had a good window opportunity where we could improve the overall user-flow.
Insights
Only 2% of the customers return to the shop due to a previous positive experience.
61% of people tested were unaware that this organisation had an online shop.
81% of people buying from the shop were doing it just to support the cause.
Opportunities
Increasing awareness and prominence of the online shop from the main website.
Improving the experience encourages repeat users
Strengthen the USP and retarget costumers throughout the site.
Competitive landscape:
I, then, ran a few searches online to find out more about the products and what other companies were approaching this cause.
I soon found out how websites were showing the products and how challenging was for the user to choose the right product by running tests/asking simple questions about our website and others.
Some websites had a Cluttered homepage and the product information is not highlighted.
This for us was a big discovery as we could improve massively by showcasing a better product information page.
Why desktop first:
Understand the users:
To validate my discoveries, I ran a short online survey at the AS online shop checkout, mapped and tested your current website journey and conducted in-depth interviews / recently bought living-aid products.
We had an amazing 157 respondents who have purchased from the online shop asking questions like:
Why did they choose to shop at the Alzheimer's Society?
How easy was it to find what they were looking for?
What would help make their purchase decision?
I found out what our users really wanted from the website and what we should focus our design on:
More defined product page.
Product reviews.
Easier navigation and checkout process.
Persona:
After the testing and the survey, I created an emotional map to find out where and how we could implement a new approach.
To consolidate all our research findings we created our persona:
- a fictional representation of our users’ insights.
Let’s meet Molly:
P.S: For this project I assumed that Holly:
Her mum has been diagnosed with Dementia.
Wants to know if she is buying the right product to attend to her mum’s needs.
She feels that online shop from charity websites is generally difficult to navigate, but she would actively buy from them to support the cause.
Design studio:
When the group and the client got together to run a design studio session, many good ideas were drawn on paper and it was helpful to understand more about the client and their difficulties we had some “How might we..?” to help us focus on the task.
Paper prototype and testing:
Right after the design studio, we sketched our ideas on paper to run the first set of tests. The team had 2 ideas for the homepage so what we did A/B testing and we ran 2 rounds of testing with 10 users.
AB test: experiment where two variants of a page are shown to users at random to see which one perform better.
Concept A:
Focused on what the website offers. (products and gifts)
Concept B:
Focused on the different ways the user could use the website and buy the right product.
The team ran the different pages with 12 users and we had good insights from both pages.
Insights homepage A - Buttons and layout:
What we offer section looked like a go to action button and the layout was confusing.
Tabs were overwhelming on the homepage.
Insight homepage B - Different way of shopping:
The wording is not clear for the user.
The solution:
A combination of the two concepts has resulted to be the most user-friendly.
