A/B Testing Backlog and E-Commerce Recommendations
Role
UX Designer
Company
AND Digital
Client
N/A Academic Bookseller
Year
2022
The bookseller came to AND Digital because they had an 88% cart abandonment rate on their e-commerce website, and they wanted help to reduce it down.
They asked us to speak to customers, gain their insight, and uncover pain points in order to build an A/B testing backlog and improve their conversion rate.
Business Needs
Discovery Workshop
To understand the business needs and set the direction of the project, we ran a workshop to define aims, assumptions, successes, and potential failures of the project.
The direction was influenced by four main project pillars that were uncovered during the workshop:
Implement a process to create and prioritise A/B tests
Recommendations to improve overall conversion
Educating the business in understanding their customers
Highlighting the importance of a consistent tone of voice
Stakeholders were really involved at this stage helping us understand what their long and short-term goals for this project were.
Success was defined as:
Being more customer centred, with a backlog of at least six months of enhancements
Improving overall customer experience with high value enhancements
Ensuring the wider team were brought onboard to feel part of the process
Tone of Voice
We interviewed users and copy writers to establish what they believed to be the problems with the current tone of voice, and what they wanted to sound like moving forward.
We found that there were no set guidelines and with the different sections of the website being managed by different teams, inconsistency was easy to spot. There was also usually one senior editor to approve content, so a set of guidelines would also alleviate the workload.
User Needs
UX Review
Having never seen their site before, I went in to document a set of journeys around finding a book or information.
The review was used alongside Google Analytics data as a starting point for the team to create hypotheses and questions to ask our users.
User Interviews
With the majority of users dropping out before entering the checkout journey, we interviewed the bookseller's users, having grouped them into three main personas: students, faculty members, and professionals.
Some of the reasons we found for people dropping off were:
Lack of trust
The search functionality didn't function as expected
The cart page had too many distractions
Backlog Building
How Might We and Ideation
During playback we generated and themed "how might we's". Our stakeholders took part and then voted on the areas we should start with that would bring the most impact.
Now we needed inspiration, and for that, we turned to lightning demos. Each person in the workshop brought a screenshot of a product screen and had annotated what and why they liked certain parts of the page or process.
Test Experiments
Taking the highest voted ideas, we turned each of them into their own tests. Quick UX wins also got visual designs to show the client's team what they could do.
Prioritising
The blended team, including the product owner, lead developer, and head of marketing for the bookseller, prioritised each test in an effort vs value matrix. Each axis had a score up to 10 and was used to determine the final priority order.
Key Takeaways
Digital Transformation
While they have an online presence, the company are very much still in the infancy of their digital transformation, having to now compete with the likes of Amazon, Blackwells, and Barnes & Noble. This project has shown the importance of ensuring others outside of the immediate group of stakeholders are brought along too, especially given the age of the bookseller and the kind of legacy processes they're used to.
Remote interviews
With the company's employee and user bases spread across the UK and the USA, tools like Lookback were key to smooth user interviews. The ability to be remote also removed factors like the AND team having to be physically present in the US just for the interviews which made it more convenient overall. I've also been dubbed the fastest note-taker.
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