User experience optimisation for an online jeweller
Background
Gemjoli is an online jewelry retail startup where customers can purchase jewelry of the shelf, customise existing jewelry, or have unique jewelry created from scratch by submitting their own designs.
The challenge
“Creating jewelry from scratch hasn’t clicked with customers.”
(Chief Financial Officer)
- Increase click through to and conversion of ‘create your own’ and ‘customise existing’ jewelry customers.
- Increase overall conversion and revenue.
Discovery
Looking inward
Gemjoli’s existing website and ecosystem was reviewed. A top level content audit and user data analysis showed:
- A lack of hierarchy and structure of information.
- The content strategy was missing channels that would drive traffic to the website.
- The website did not have the required look and feel to sell premium products.
- Online tools to create jewelry from scratch were malfunctioning.
- Google Analystics funnels revealed drop of rates for various stages in the purchase flow.
Looking outward
Customer research through surveys and follow-up phone interviews provided motivations and pain points of Gemjoli’s existing customers.
- Quantitative survey results from 654 existing customers revealed:
- 60% of visitors were looking for existing products
- 35% used Gemjoli’s service to combine or alter existing designs
- 0.5% were interested in creating jewelry from scratch
- 4.5% Other responses
Definition
Verbatim from survey and interviews revealed that there was virtually no customer desire to design jewelry from scratch. this was therefore no longer pursued and focus was shifted to optimise the user experience of customising jewelry:
“I can’t draw.”
“I’m not a designer.”
“Design tools […] don’t work well.”
Personas
Data analysis showed that more than 90% of customers looking to customise jewelry were interested in designing a ring.
Two personas were created, Jane who wants to design a ring for herself:
“I like this ring but I want to make it unique and special.”
And John, who wants to design an engagement ring
“I want a top quality ring for this very personal occasion.”
Ideation
Flows were designed, based on verbatim from interviews, to explore how to best serve customers needs. Together with problem statements, this formed the basis for co-design sessions with business stakeholders which were translated into wireframes.
Results
Findings form the design process and final results were played back to Gemjoli’s owner and investors. This resulted in the removal of the ‘create from scratch’ business vertical. Instead, the business focus was shifted to customising jewelry.
Delivery
The homepage was redesigned to clearly emphasise on ‘customising an existing product’. The purchase flow for this was designed, prototyped and handed over to the developers.