Mobile and Desktop Wayfinding
for a Major Clothing Retailer
Improving customer wayfinding across mobile and desktop for a major online children’s clothing retailer
The Outcome
Our research found that users were able to effectively navigate the site however results were often missing due to underlying metadata issues and changes to the results page format.
The Challenge
Ensure that shoppers are able to find items of interest across both mobile and desktop shopping experiences.
Project Overview
After altering their IA and experiencing a decrease in sales, a major online retailer partnered with the User Experience Center at Bentley University to improve customer wayfinding for children’s clothing. The specific goals of this research engagement were to:
Understand the current online shopping experience across desktop and mobile.
Determine if the navigational structure matches user expectations.
Benchmark site shopping experience against major competitors.
Approach
Client kick-off > identify research questions > protocol development > one-on-one interviews > data analysis > final report
This research was conducted one-on-one within Bentley’s state of the art usability labs. Twelve participants were recruited including a mixture of both current customers and non-customers who shopped at similar stores. Half of the participants had a self-directed shopping experience completing a purchase while the other half had a moderator-directed shopping experience. This mixture of self-directed shopping and task-based shopping gave us a detailed picture of how users approach their online shopping while also enabling us to take a deep dive into particular areas of interest. During the study, participants interacted with the website on mobile and desktop to see how the experience varied across platforms.
Findings
*Note: Detailed findings of this research are under NDA
Underlying site issues limit results, not site hierarchy
By the end of the study we had determined that there were underlying issues preventing participants from finding all relevant items however this was not a direct result of the recent restructure to the information architecture.
The primary navigation largely matched participant mental models with the exception of some terminology and duplicated categories.
Underlying metadata issues inhibited search and frequently left participants with limited results and dead ends.
Pattern options and alternate designs were not clearly marked on the browse page causing participants to miss items of interest.