House2Home

Reducing decision overwhelm in eCommerce for young urban dwellers

Timeline

November 21-27, 2022

1 Week

My Role

Product designer

Disciplines

Design Sprint,
UX Design, UI Design

Tools

Figma, Figjam

Young urban dwellers wish to decorate their new homes with multiple items, but lack the confidence in achieving their desired look on their own and within budget.

House2Home sells home decor and accessories online and wants to explore the solution concept of bundled starter kits - a collection of items that can quickly decorate a new space. I created a desktop experience consisting of a “Find Your Kit” quiz and a Product Detail Page (PDP) that showcases a decor kit and its products.

Short quiz narrows down and personalizes toward specific room, desired look, must-have items and budget

Easily swap item(s) for another that still fit desired look and budget

Items are always visually presented together, and update after swaps

Day 1: Understand + Map

User Interviews Insights

Every project must begin with understanding the problem through the users’ minds. After reviewing and analyzing user interview highlights, I distilled the following key insights:

1. Overwhelm comes from the fact that one look and feel consists of not only one but multiple decor items - which means a lot of separate decisions on which items to choose, and one big decision of whether they all fit within the same look.

2. Overwhelm also comes from the burden of adding up various items’ prices and fitting the total into a single final budget.

Persona

To empathize deeper with the young urban dwellers that were interviewed, I created a persona that encompassed the commonalities across all of them. Meet Ally, a young professional wishing to decorate her new apartment.

I mapped out several ways for Ally to achieve her end goal of decorating her newly moved-in home, but ultimately chose the one below because:

1. It answers to Ally’s pain points, motivations and goals and solves both How Might We questions, and

2. It’s the most realistic to achieve given a tight time frame

Flow Map

Day 2: Learn + Sketch

Learn from competitors

When I managed eCommerce websites in my previous job, I regularly drew inspiration from browsing other sites. It was no different this time when I researched and learned from several direct and indirect competitors solving the similar problem of selling multiple items in a bundled way.

Direct competitors

1. Design Within Reach

2. The Citizenry

Indirect competitors

3. Sculpd

4. Abercrombie & Fitch

With the exception of Sculpd, all other competitors still sold items separately and not in a single bundle with one final price.

For my own solution, I envisioned Ally to be able to add to cart, with a single click, all the items she needs to complete her desired look, and do so all within her budget.

Given the tight timeframe, I utilized the Crazy 8 method to quickly create 8 sketches, each within a minute or so. I focused the sketching on the PDP because it’s the most complex and important page in the flow. It would be where Ally sees all items together and decides if they are fulfilling her desired look, makes some changes if she likes, and verifies the total price of all items fits within her budget, before she adds the kit to cart.

Ideation

Final Sketch

Instead of choosing just 1 sketch, I combined the best elements from 3 sketches (indicated by green thumbs-up icons above) to form a new final sketch. These elements were all about providing Ally with just enough customization without overwhelming her:

1. Provide choices in the number of items within a kit

Earlier, a user quote talked to the pain point of only affording 3 or 4 items when a look is created by 10+ items. Ally can easily make a choice between a 3- and a 4-item kit when the total price updates immediately after each selection.

2. Easily swap out an item within the kit

Ally can either swap items directly on the image that showcases all items together in a realistic room setting or swap within the individual item detail section.

Day 3: Storyboard

To visualize Ally’s entire home decor shopping experience, I created a storyboard using the finalized Crazy 8 sketch. The storyboard also served as lightweight sketched wireframes on which I would build my prototype later.

Day 4: Prototype

I focused on building a prototype with essential features needed to test my main ideas - placing more attention on the “Find Your Kit” quiz and the product detail page for the decor kits. But I also needed to make the prototype realistic enough to elicit useful (and not hypothetical) tester feedback. That meant the web pages all had a realistic header and a navigation bar. The homepage also had some realistic merchandising zones under the “Find Your Kit” hero section.

Day 5: Test

Due to the limited amount of time and the Thanksgiving holidays period, recruiting testers that looked exactly like Ally was a bit difficult. 2/5 testers, like Ally, live alone in apartments in urban areas, but the rest either lived in urban apartments with another family member or lived in a suburban townhome.

Test Participants

Testing showed that the 4-question quiz and swap of items on PDP were helpful in the shopping journey and easy to use.

Test Results & Insights

However, there are opportunities for the swap experience to improve. Currently it’s clumsy, because after a swap, you have to scroll up and down the page to see both the main image change and the individual item row change. In addition:

Learnings

My 3-/4-/5-item variations did not integrate well with the preceding quiz when the quiz already narrows down to the specific item variations within budget. I should have paused during the storyboard process to check the coherency of the entire flow. The item variations feature works better for shoppers who use another way to get to a PDP, and want to assess how many items they can afford.

What I’d Do Differently Next Time

Maximum spend question in quiz should have asked for a flexible range, rather than one max figure. In reality, Ally may not have just a single number in mind. She may have upgraded from a 3-item kit to a 4-item kit within the same decor kit, if the upgrade cost is within her budget range.

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