Modernizing an old experience.
One of the biggest and core changes to the online shopping experience I discovered needing a major and fundamental overhaul was the clunking search process. It took years of convincing and attempting to get the project at the top of the roadmap, and finally, we were able to do so through a defined ROI and market analysis. Designing the online search experience allowing for a customer to filter based on a products attribute(s) is so common in the market it was a clear improvement that should be made, especially as the product range was expanding over two brands rapidly.
What was amazing was how the little details can be the hardest thing to get over the line, not the years of convincing and planning trying to get the project off the ground in the first place, but the detail of how you structure and categorise the products in the admin, I can certainly say this was not what I was expecting at all when we commenced the project.
During the research phase like all projects, you analysis how other businesses manage their experience to see how that might impact the customers mental model and how they might expect to go about using any online search. So, we went about analysing not just the interactive process but the data models and categorisation that they use. I never really knew how interesting information architecture (IA) can be until doing this one.
The design of the UI and the overall interaction design ended up being the easiest part of this project not without its problems of course but nothing like the process we needed to go through to get the eCommerce manager to approve the data model for the products. One thing that became very clear to all was the impact that the model would have on the end-users experience across both brands. This was one of the sticky points on getting a decision, as one brand would have a focus on part of the product range while the other was going to feature the entire product catalogue. The other issue was how it was all going to be managed by the eCommerce team in the admin as this experience also needs to be designed and catered for.
Some of the questions that needed to be answered, Is the navigation going to be linked to the categories? Is the IA going to be hierarchical or polyhierarchical? 1 categorisation for both brands (shop front) or 1 per shop front? All difficult and fundamental to the whole customer experience.
We approached getting a decision by systematically mapping the different data models and explaining the benefits and problems of each with wireframes of the expected experience for the admin and shop front so that the eCommerce manager could make a fully informed decision.
A choice was made and agreed by all parties that it would work, even if the outcome is not aligned to your choice(let’s be honest we all want to be our choice to be the one that is used). In the end, it was made with all the information possible knowing that any choice will work for business purposes and would have a positive outcome for both customers and staff.