Subdued
Subdued is one of Italy's most popular retail brands, and is set out to create a complete look for effortlessly chic teenage girls between the ages of 13-21 years old.
My role
For this project, my tasks involved understanding the e-commerce market, empathizing with customers and uncovering their core pain points when shopping for clothing online. As result I was able to understand our target audience and creatively build a product that would ultimately satisfy their needs as well as the company’s demands.
Background
Subdued already had an existing digital app, but the number of downloads was 40% below the goal the company had set. Studying the customers’ online shopping behavior, mobile ecommerce applications yield higher conversion rates than mobile websites. Because of the user-friendly nature and convenience that mobile apps offer, people can make a purchase in just a few clicks. This seamless experience is what encourages customers to purchase online. Also, mobile apps are a constant presence in smartphones of users. Through timely notifications and order tracking, users are directly connected to the company in many ways that transcend brand awareness. itself. And last but not least, apps usually store their data locally on mobile devices, unlike websites that generally use web servers. For this reason, data retrieval happens swiftly in mobile apps. Apps can further save users' time by storing their preferences and taking proactive actions on users' behalf. When our project first started, only 25% of the users that downloaded the app actually created an account and only 42% of the customers that made a purchase did so through their account. With all that being said, it was easy to understand why it was so important for the company to have an efficient app and, most importantly, a platform where customers would be glad to download and use it frequently. We were assigned the challenging goal of redesigning an outdated app in order to increase at least 40% the account sign-up total number.
Understanding the customer
To be able to give our users what they need, we knew that we had to first study and actively know them and their thought process while using our app — or why they would choose not to use it. By developing a deeper understanding of their feelings, thoughts, behaviors, and needs, we were effectively able to identify our users pain points and solve the design problems that would eventually come up.
Empathy Map
Empathy maps were a great tool for understanding our users, organizing our research, and driving a human rather than technical view of our product and project. We created these to provide a proxy for the user during the design and to ensure that the project team is in a human-centered mindset. It allowed us to understand the broader influencers in user's lives. And by organizing our research into a coherent vision, this tool allows us to gain empathy with our users and to create a cohesive, empathetic view of them.
Starting to map
Considering what we learned about the customer so far, it was time to map the current app to know exactly where we should focus our priorities in, as well as to check what types of inconsistencies the users could face based on the journeys that were available to navigate through the original app at that time.
With the current app sitemap done, we revisited the empathy map to cross important user’s needs to be met, and we quickly identified that the current app did not deliver key points that were essential for a basic online shopping navigation, such as the fact that sales and seasonal offerings’ CTAs were not displayed in the homepage. We then shifted our work flow from studying and understanding the current system to then create new guidelines and a conversion strategy based on the business requirements, especially in-platform account sign-up.
One of the biggest changes that were made to the new map was the removal of the top menu bar. It allowed us to use the top section for promos and sales CTAs, and on top of that we placed a sign-up campaign banner that would lead the user in a non-disruptive (yet constant) way towards the account sign-up page. As a consequence of the menu placement shift, we concentrated the top five features on a new bottom menu bar (four of the most accessed features, plus the Account icon in order to place it in a high-visibility are), making it easier to the user to reach them ergonomically. Also we added more features on the screen so the user can scroll and view more items in the home page.
Ideation & Prototype
My next step was to create a interactive prototype using Adobe XD. This prototype allowed us to test our hypothesis directly with real users and confirm that we were working on significant and effective changes that would correspond to our customers’ expectations. Since one of the main focal points of this project was to find ways to increase data retrieval, we started the user journey with a pop-up overlay that gives the user the option to sign-up right before they enter the home page, showing them how advantageous it could be for them to create an account and enjoy a variety of benefits in exchange for their information. It’s also important to mention our continued work with Subdued’s marketing team to create a promotional strategy that would benefit our campaing. They allowed the activation of a 20% discount code on the first purchase after account sign-up, and permanent free shipping in orders of $100 or more if the user already has an active Subdued account.
Here is a short example of some of the important actions the new homepage now provides: - A variety of CTAs that display sales, promos, campaigns and seasonal offerings; - A direct link from the homepage to the Sale Products page.
Finally, we added a pop-up overlay before the checkout with a login CTA. On the sign up page, we explain the benefits of signing up, mentioning the convinience of having pre-saved data, and also the perk of setting preferences for the next purchases and app navigation.
The newsletter was also a minor attention point during this project. This is a great collaborative effort from our UX Design team along with Subdued’s Marketing team, offering quality content to our customers delivered by email, through trend alerts, notifications of new products, lifestyle, special & seasonal offers, etc.
User Testing
To validate design decisions we set user test invites on Subdued’s email newsletters and scheduled sessions with 45 users for 8 task-based user testings. The User Testing took place in February of 2020. These are the results from one of our most important tests in the battery:
Results
After wrapping up our usability tests we found some areas of improvement that would be implemented with allocated time and budget. In hindsight, more usability testing and research would uncover additional pain points and would lead us to making better design decisions. A month after our app iteration was launched, we had a very pleasant feedback meeting where it was announced that the app download rate went up 56% (16% higher than expected). Also, the rate of users that have created an account in the app without an accompanying purchase increased 77%! The next challenge assigned to us was to work on a more personal interaction between the brand and our users through the app. We took all of our previous user testing suggestions and started to work on a way to make the customer feel like they were navigating on a social media interface, where they had everything they needed right there on the app. Unfortunately this project got archived due to the pandemic.
