Team: Front End Developer, Product Manager, Content Strategist, Customer Insights, Analyst
Key Outcomes
A/B Testing Across 8 Initial Redesigned Pages
• 10.5% order lift
• Nearly 7% conversion lift
Improved page performance:
• 35% faster time to interactive
• 58% faster speed index
Problem Statement
Overstock's navigation pages suffered from cluttered layouts, a lack of hierarchy, and an over-abundance of sales tags, resulting in a confusing, cheap-looking, and difficult to navigate user experience (particularly on mobile devices). Despite receiving fifty percent of overall site traffic, these pages experienced high bounce rates and low conversion rates, likely contributing to a decline in overall repeat site traffic. Internal stakeholders expressed concern about the impression customers were forming about the quality and assortment that we offered, due to the outdated photography, mismatched content, and poor responsive layouts that displayed the content in a broken manner. To make matters worse, the current page designs lacked CMS design thinking, resulting in operational team difficulties in updating, scaling, and maintaining the content with accuracy.
How might we help customers navigate to what they are looking for, while simultaneously serving a better impression of our brand, that’s scalable for our teams to maintain?
Discovery
Methodologies
In order to better understand and validate the problems outlined, I conducted discovery sessions including: analyzing quantitative data of user journeys, reviewing customer segmentation research, researching competitor experiences, and holding stakeholder interview sessions with marketing, creative, and operational teams.
Discovery Insights
Segmentation research and path-to-site analysis revealed qualitative and quantitative data showing thatusers are predominantly in the interest phase of the purchase funnel, indicating their intent to explore Overstock's product offerings and form a perception of the brand. The majority of users quickly bounced from these pages without clicking or scrolling deep, suggesting dissatisfaction and misalignment with their expectations. The research also indicated that customers in the interest phase on Overstock.com are seeking quality and stylish home products at a value.
The existing navigation pages failed to meet customer expectations due to cluttered design, lack of mobile adaptability, and absence of a cohesive content strategy. Marketing interviews revealed the need to improve brand perception through better-designed responsive templates and overall content depiction.
Additionally, interviews with operational teams revealed that they were updating layouts repeatedly with mismatched templates. Content was regularly implemented designed, exported, and uploaded many times into confusing and difficult-to-update CMS standards that could be streamlined into one efficient template.
Design Process & Strategy
Wireframes
To better empathize with the customers user perspective, I crafted hypothetical scenarios and questions:
Q: What experience attributes contribute to a positive brand impression and aid in assessing quality? A: Utilizing larger, professionally curated product photos that exhibit coherence. (The current experience lacks consistency, featuring small images, renderings, and varied photo styles.) Q: How can we improve visual navigation to help customers reach their intended destination? A: Establishing clear visual hierarchy and differentiated sections on the page. (The current experience lacks hierarchy, leading to confusion in navigation.)
Content Strategy & Visual Design
Collaboration between the content strategist and the team led to the curation of product images that effectively represent each category while highlighting product quality and stylish offerings. New shopping options based on price points were introduced, along with helpful content such as guides and articles. Through the use of prominent graphic callouts and color blocking, I conceived a page design that highlighted the newly defined content hierarchy, paying particular attention to customers’ focus on quality and style at good value.
CMS Design Improvements
Considering the future usability of internal users, I developed a responsive design strategy aimed at ensuring content looks good across all screen sizes while minimizing the need for custom design. This approach not only facilitates easier content management, but also addresses operational scalability concerns, crucial for maintaining quality updates. Furthermore, a responsive development strategy focused that focused graphic elements, rather than live text, was implemented to enhance content consistency across all screen sizes and streamline update processes.
Testing Outcomes