Black Friday Online User Experience - Miss Selfridge
A collaborative project for the digital launch of the Black Friday event on missselfridge.com. The project involved launching online discounts, a homepage redesign and a digital marketing campaign for the promotional event that is common within the retail industry.
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Company
Miss Selfridge (Arcadia Group)
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Project Date & Duration
August - November 2020
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My Roles
User Journey, Information Architecture, Wireframing, Usability Testing, Data Analysis, Competitive Audit
PROJECT SUMMARY
The project aim was to successfully launch a week long series of updates to the design of the website to maximise sales performance during the promotional event.
This included a homepage redesign, updates to the site's information architecture and user journey, changes to online product pricing and daily content changes throughout the week.
My role was to maximise sales performance through optimisation of the user journey.
The challenge
As consumer interest in ‘Black Friday’ grows within the industry the balance between business need and user need is a tricky one to get right during the deep discounting event.
Users continue to need easy and intuitive experiences when discount shopping online. However with so many competitors, heavy discounts and a global pandemic to contend with, businesses need to ensure they are profitable during this time of year.
How do we keep user needs top of mind during the event and still ensure that business objectives are met?
THE SOLUTION
Using data to understand user need
Analysing website analytics data and past sales performance gave insight into how to approach the design to best fit user needs and maximise revenue.
Data from Google Analytics and Content Square helped identify how users navigate the website. The desire for discounts was high in our customers as most users tended to navigate straight to discounted products when landing on the site. Black Friday designs needed to make discounting and pricing a prominent feature to ensure navigation was easy for the user.
Looking at high volume searches and past top selling products helped us anticipate key products users would be looking to buy - these styles were featured throughout homepage designs and email content to help users find what they are looking for.
Homepage wireframing
Wireframing the homepages meant collaboration between teams was efficient. Using wireframes meant high fidelity designs could be created by the visual designers more easily as key elements were identified early on.
Using example imagery in digital wireframes added a visual element for stakeholders to review before high fidelity designs were completed.
High fidelity homepage created by visual designers. Use of vibrant colours and conversational copy incorporated the brand personality that users love!
Information Architecture
Alongside ensuring clear and easy navigation on the homepage a number of additional updates were made to the sites information architecture for the event.
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1. Global Navigation categories
All discounted products were categorised into a single product category.
Updates were made to the category positioning & labelling to make it easier for customer to navigate to this category during the event.
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2. Left Hand Navigation/ Filter options
Research phases showed users tended to not interact with the left hand navigation if there were a lot of product options to choose from - choice principle at work!
LHN filter options were reduced for the Black Friday category page to aid user decision making.
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3. Search
High volume search terms were identified during the early research phases as well.
These results pages were optimised to create a smooth user journey and also emails were planned around these key search terms!
‘Jean and a nice top’ email included based on users key search terms ‘jeans’ and ‘tops’.
Usability testing
After all designs were created rigorous usability testing was undertaken internally. Group usability testing in advance of the launch meant catching bugs or errors was a collaborative effort.
High fidelity prototypes were tested in the site's staging environment before launch and the live site was also tested post launch.
Website analytics tools were used throughout the week to understand user behaviour and live changes were made to content if user needs weren’t being met.
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Before
Example bug found during mobile usability testing. Certain imagery was not appearing, meaning the user could only see a blank screen when scrolling.
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After
Feature working correctly after bug was fixed. Users can now see the relevant images and continue their journey by clicking the tiles.
Results
Ensuring the design was user-centred helped Miss Selfridge achieve its highest week of gross sales ever for the digital channel, with the Black Friday day itself being the highest day of sales on record for the site at the time.
Collaboration and regular communication across teams played a huge part in the successful launch of the project. Additionally, using visually engaging methods to involve stakeholders throughout helped gain their buy in and allowed the project to run more smoothly.