Ecommerce research.

Studying the Ecommerce audience to create a personal solution.

Overview

Over 2 months, we interviewed self-identified online store owners with a mix of skill levels, genders, products, and store types.

Our intention with this research is to help us imagine and create a product experience that will better complement our online store owners’ lives, support their needs, and align with how they want to do things.

Outcome
  • Identified 2 online store personas
  • Learned about main pain points online store customers face
  • Came up with a proposed solution to help these customers succeed
Role

As the lead UX researcher, I was responsible for user interviews, ideation workshops, analysis, and presentation.

Team

This was product-driven research with 4 designers.

Duration

2.5 months

The process.

During our interviews, we captured detailed notes. After each interview, we had brief team sync to discuss interesting findings. When we finished our interviews, we used affinity mapping to sort 419 observations into themes. We then distilled these themes into core insights. Next, we reshaped the insights into “how might we” opportunities.

As we define and design a solution experience for online store owners, we will root our core design decisions in these “how might we” opportunities.

Where we started.

From the foundational research that was done many months before, we dug deeper into our Side-gig Pursuer & Serial Entrepreneur personas with a focus on our online store owners.

Interviewing & preparation.

We identified the audience we wanted to interview and wrote the script. Then we scheduled 14 interviews with the ecommerce store owners to discuss their goals, needs, pain points, process, and strategy.

Gathering & grouping observations.

After we collected all of the observations from the interviews, we got together with a group of stakeholders to create an affinity diagram which would help us categorize and group the notes by topic.

10 core insights.

  • Online store owners…
    1. … are struggling to set up their site and make it look the way they want.
    2. … think that social media is the best marketing tool.
    3. … rely on email/text and product notifications to check new orders.
    4. … see creating and sharing content as a valuable marketing strategy.
    5. … are “wearing too many hats.”
    6. … think that paid ads don’t offer a good ROI.
    7. … aren’t focused on site traffic — they are focused on store analytics.
    8. … don’t have enough time to work on products.
    9. … aren’t doing too many refunds, and if they do the process is simple.
    10. … create new products through duplication.

Creating journey maps.

Using the notes and insights we’d learned from the interviews, we mapped out their journeys and identified key areas of failure and success. Having this information really helped focus our attention on user risks.

Key takeaways.

Online Store Owners are passionate creatives who want to sell their products online. They often fit into our side-gig pursuer persona. The online store creation process is difficult and they need a lot of guidance to get started.

Main pain points:

Not knowing how to set up their store (i.e. site design)

Struggling to find successful marketing methods

Other major pain points:

    • Little time available to work on their store
    • Small budgets, so they need to see a ROI as soon as possible
    • Not always sure how to promote their products/store
    • Not always sure where to focus their time
    • Not sure who to hire to help with their site/marketing
    • Not knowing how to scale their business

Brainstorming a solution.

Brainstormed a solution by conducting an ideation workshop. HMW (How Might We’s) always helps me rethink the problem in a form of a solution, or the question of how we could solve the problem. We then voted on these HMW to identify the most valuable issues we should be working on.

Potential solutions.

Once we identified the direction, we got together and brainstormed various solutions. We grouped these solutions into 3 pillars of creation, management & marketing and support & knowledge.

Creation

Drag and drop website builder

Store templates with demo content

Easy way to add blogs to stores

Optimized default settings for payments, shipping, taxes, etc.

A checklist of tasks to help them create and promote their store

Management & Marketing

Product management

Orders and fulfillment management

Customer management

Social media analytics

Access to freelancers in product with Fiverr, Upwork, Maestro etc.

Social sharing tool for their store’s products

Support & Knowledge

Guided tours of website building application

Reminder of tasks to be done

Access to a community of other small business and online store owners

Customer support that would help create and manage a store

Regularly scheduled emails with snapshot of sales, traffic, and new reviews

What’s next?

    1. Create a survey to understand which of these features are top priority for our online store owners.
    2. Identify which features are a must for our first release and build out a roadmap for our first release and subsequent releases.
    3. Design and build out our first release in an agile fashion, testing and validating our design decisions with our online store owners along the way.
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