Wishlist for The Home Depot
Project Overview:
The overall objectives of this project was simple, allow users to save and keep track of products they are interested in, but not ready to purchase yet. As this was a new feature, we needed to build an experience which allowed users to complete the most important actions and that could be scaled in the future.
Empathize and Define:
For this project, the UX team was working with some tight timelines so we needed to move quickly. We started by compiling as many resources as possible on how to build an effective experience, with a specific focus on how to cater best to the home improvement demographic.
We reviewed UX literature, analyzed different competitors (inside and outside our demographic) and defined in as much detail as possible, the different opportunities we had and prioritized them as a team.
Literature Review:
Some important learnings came from our literature review which shaped our strategy moving forward.
75% of e-commerce sites require users to sign-in in order to access a wishlist feature. Allowing guest users to access the feature could provide a competitive advantage and reduce the friction of having to sign-in or create account.
Guest users could then be incentivized to sign-in or create an account later in order to maintain access to their list for prolonged periods of time. (Guest data can only be saved for set amount of time before expiring)
While a “Wishtlist” feature can offer users great benefits, it is not the primary goal of most users on the site. It is important it does not become overly prominent or distract users from finding and purchasing products now.
Its important to provide some form of visual feedback when users are interacting with the feature. This is to ensure to the user that their action of saving an item was successful as well as to make it easy to find and access later.
Competitive Analysis:
Looking into how competitors organized and built a “Wishlist” experience allowed us to best understand what actions or needs each competitor catered too, and which opportunities or use cases they prioritized.
We built flowcharts and documented information and actions presented at each step with the goal of understanding an ideal path. We also compiled a list of all of the different options, actions and tools each competitor offered.
Opportunities & Prioritization:
After presenting all of our research to our sprint team and stakeholders, discussed opportunities and which would best benefit the Home Improvement Persona, we organized a prioritization session to further define the scope of the project. From here, we left the door open to explore ideas, but narrowed down with our Product and IT partners, what must be included in scope, which features would be a nice to have and what could be revisited later.
Ideating and Designing Solutions:
After defining our ‘MVP’ experience, leaving some doors open depending on what we learned from testing, each designer on the team designed an initial experience. We worked on these independently at first, creating low-fidelity mock ups with a focus on the actions, flow and basic UI elements.
We hosted another sprint session with all of our project stakeholders where each designer walked through their designs, the choices they made and asked and answered questions. The team then voted on all of the strongest ideas from each, allowing us to take away and adapt each idea into 1 more formalized design.
We created a mid-fidelity prototype and organized our test plan.
Testing:
Test Setup
To make sure users were going to use our designs as we intended, we organized a number of ‘unmoderated usability tests'. This is where a user will interact with our prototype and complete a set list of tasks and questions on their own. To start this process, we first focused in on what our research objectives were, what did we want to learn from the test?
Some examples of our research questions:
Do users understand how they can add or remove products from their wishlist?
Do users understand how they can access their wishlist after they have saved their products?
Do users understand how they can add products from their wishlist to their cart to make a purchase?
From there, we established what a users goal might be when interacting with this feature. This way, we could make sure that we were testing all of the different actions or paths a user might take.
User Goals & Actions:
Goal: Keep track of items they’re interested in. Action: Add product to list.
Goal: Revisit or manage a list previously built. Action: Navigate to list.
Establishing all of these details helped us to write an effective test script that would provide users with a real-world scenario, in our case, creating a list of products for a bathroom remodel project. It also allowed us to create effective tasks and questions that would target each action or goal.
Reviewing Results:
After reviewing and taking notes on the feedback we received from users, the team set up ‘Affinity Mapping’ sessions to summarize the results. The goal of these sessions is to synthesis all of the data and try to identify any common themes in the feedback that we received. If a number of users ran into the same problems or had trouble with any specific actions, we could understand where pain-points existed in the designs and where we could make improvements.
In our first round of testing we found that:
Some users had issues understanding how they could add multiple products to their cart from the wishlist page. A missed opportunity, as this could save users a lot of time.
Same went for removing multiple products from their list at once.
Iterating and Retesting:
After sharing all of these insights and aligned on a new direction to address the pain-points uncovered in testing, we repeated the same process outlined above until all issues were solved.
Handoff:
Once we were satisfied with the experience and were sure that all user issues were solved, we prepared the project to be handed off to product and development teams. This includes a long list of UI deliverables and documentation to create to make sure the transition between teams is smooth. Here are just a few examples:
UI designs for all potential scenarios: Different products types, all necessary site sections, empty wishlist, notifications and error messaging are just a few examples.
Copy documentation, including all new copy created for the project and their translations.
AODA compliance requirements like icon, link or image alt text where required.
Updated and functioning prototypes to document intended flow and demonstrate animations.
