Bob’s Discount Furniture

An American furniture chain of stores that sells home furnishings at discounted rates. With around 140 stores across the US, they aim to sell dreamy apartment furnitures at unbelievable prices.

Overview

What..

An e-commerce redesign project, with aim to reimagine the overall online purchase experience of mybobs.com website. The project scope included user research, information architecture, wireframes, prototypes, UI design and micro-animations. The project had a tight timeline of 9 months from inception to production deploy.
Why..

The former website was not performing as desired and indicated enormous user experiences issues through the purchase journey. The Bob’s management team decided to redesign the complete experience to match the market competition as well as attract new customers and retain existing customers with a delightful experience.
How..

The presence of a former website gave us ample opportunities to learn about the user navigation pattern, behavior and user flow through statistics. The project strategy was built on findings from analytics, heatmaps and user recordings to derive a seamless and personalised purchase journey.

The Design Problem

The former website reported extensive usability issues with data indicating very high bounce rates, exit rates and task incompletion rates. The users could not find their desired products since the architecture was deep and wide leading to user confusion. Also the website was not optimised for mobile, which, in-fact had the highest recorded user sessions.

Since the problem statement was well identified in user research, designing that delightful solution got much more simpler and efficient.

The Design Approach

Study, analyse and observe data

The data collected for the former website was available on Google analytics, hotjar heatmaps and mouseflow user recordings.

After extensive research, key findings were that the users were extremely price sensitive, spent 3-5 days browsing before the purchase, preferred exploration through mobile and checkout though a desktop.

It was also observed that the Cart had a high abandonment rate and the highest bounce rate. On evaluation, we concluded that it was caused by 2 main reasons, the user was forced to create an account to place the order, and the Cart also surprised the user with additional shipping costs increasing the total amount by 10-12%

Indication of high bounce rates for cart to checkout

Translate data to design strategy

Research findings clearly indicated mobile device was the most used one, however the website was not optimised leading to high bounce rates. First design strategy was to begin with a mobile first approach for all pages and further scale up for other devices. Checkout process was simplified with only 3 steps, with primary focus on desktop followed by mobile.

To reduce the Cart bounce rate, an approximate shipping cost was shown from beginning of user journey based on zip code. A new feature to place an order as Guest was also designed, to reduce the order completion friction.

Above the fold area was reevaluated to show critical CTA’s with minimal scroll, increasing the overall conversions

Design, prototype and review

The initial sprints of project delivers interactive wireframes, which were reviewed with client stakeholders and engineers to gather feedback. Once reviewed, these were passed on to the UI designers to further create detailed mockups.

The mockups were also reviewed with client stakeholders and engineers to gather feedback. Once reviewed the design specifications were handed over to engineers along with style guide and tech specifications

Design QA

At the end of every sprint, the developed features are tested by designers to identify any usability issues and ensure that the outcome matches the desired design.

This process ensured we fill any gaps identified during development and release a great feature every sprint successfully

The project was designed and delivered in 9 months. Within 3 months of go-live, the data showed positive results with 8% increase in online sales, radically reduced bounce rates of 18% and increase in mobile sessions by 31%

Key learnings and takeaway

Data driven design strategy helped us identify tangible problem areas and craft a tailored design strategy. Being an intense timeline project, business value and user value were the key parameters used for feature prioritisation.