Increasing the conversion rate of website visitors to customers
Timeline
6 weeks
tools
Adobe XD
role
UX/UI Designer
How might we make the online shopping experience easier for homeowners planning a bathroom renovation?
Introduction
Townsend Showroom is a reseller that focuses on providing their customers with luxury plumbing products for kitchen and bathroom renovations (more focus on baths).
The design of the website has not been updated since the showroom first opened back in 2015. The task was a complete redesign of the website while also implementing an online store.
Problem
Through user research, I found that homeowners need a one-stop shop where they can find inspiration, information, and purchase materials to complete their bathroom renovations.
Homeowners lose interest when they visit the website as it does not have much information about products or the ability to purchase online, which in turn, drives them away to find other sources for more information and online shopping such as our competitors’ websites.
Goals
Increase the number of conversions from website visitors to customers
Create a seamless online shopping experience
Update the overall design of the website
Solution
main flow
Other pages
Online Purchasing
Taking users through the checkout process with the least amount of friction.
Research
To start, I had to understand who our users are, and analyze the competitive landscape so I could better help redesign the website.
Target Market
Homeowners planning bathroom renovations
Interviews
After conducting user research by interviewing participants in our target market and synthesizing the findings, I learned that users had trouble finding a one-stop shop where they can learn, find inspiration, browse through a wide variety of plumbing products, and shop online.
Persona
With the data obtained from conducting user research, the following persona was created in order to stay focused.
Daisy
37 Years old
Program Manager
Story
Daisy is a Program Manager working for the San Francisco Public Library. She has been meaning to start her bathroom renovation but has been putting it off. She doesn’t know exactly what she’s looking for as she has no experience and has just only started researching during her limited breaks.
Action
Search for information such as materials, prices, and stores near her.
Goals
- To quickly finish her bathroom renovation
- To have her home design reflect her work and personality
- To stay current with trendy designs
Frustrations
- Doesn’t know anything about the process of renovating a bathroom
- Looking for ideas and inspirations but can’t find a place with variety
- Doesn’t have a lot of time to search around
Competitive Analysis
The goals for this analysis was to determine what features, information, and other factors competitors are using in order to distinguish and think about what to incorporate with what aligns with the user research findings. These consisted of either corporate competitors or family owned showrooms.
Insights
Online Store
The biggest difference between the corporate competitors and the showrooms is that the bigger companies have the capability of adding an online store feature for users to shop around, which in turn enables them to add more features such as categories and filters. Smaller showrooms’ websites are typically acting as online business cards which only shows information about the business.
Educational Content
According to the user research conducted, all participants mentioned that they typically do some research on “how-tos”, necessary components, instruction manuals, etc. Even though most of the times they are hiring contractors to take care of the hard work, they still feel the need to educate themselves to be well versed enough for knowing what to purchase in terms of functionality and style.Having this type of information on a website along with features that eases our target user’s problems will be advantageous in both driving traffic to the website by improving SEO (Search Engine Optimization) as well as keeping users engaged.
Photo Inspirations
Just as how educational content is important to have, photo inspirations of finished projects or setups have a strong impact for users to get ideas for their current projects, or even inspiring them to start a project.
Ideation
Feature Prioritization
By honing into the biggest pain points users were having and organizing them in a 2 X 2 impact/expected matrix, we came to the conclusion on what we needed to focus on to design an MVP.
Rapid Sketching
User Flow
Prototype
Starting with low fidelity prototyping...
... and moving on to high fidelity...
...while testing often and iterating.
Final Product
Reflection
What I learned
The main takeaway user testing was that users were not using the "add to cart" button underneath the thumbnails at all. Since all of these items are luxury fixtures, the prices are incredibly higher than most where you can purchase elsewhere. Users were compelled to go to the product page to read the descriptions and see other photos before deciding to add to cart. Which is why the buttons were removed and added the "Featured Products" section on the home page to push fixtures that are more likely to be sold.
Future
The products on the design were only a small variety of what the showroom sells. As the showroom starts adding and selling more products that are not currently in their inventory, I would like continue working on the filtering system.
Website is live!
The website is live! Free to visit the Townsend Showroom website. https://www.townsendshowroomsf.com/
Note: During development of the website, Townsend showroom personnel went through an ownership transfer. Changes were made midway and some of the features and design decisions may not be the same.