Case Study: Enhancing Dufresne's Shopping Cart Experience
To make online shopping easier for guests making expensive purchases with various add-on services and payment options, Dufresne Furniture and Appliances' design team is working on UX solutions. Their goal is to improve convenience for guests while ensuring the brand's post-purchase services and site performance remain strong.
Team
Platform
Duration
Business Goals
Increase Service Visibility
Make services, warranties and financing options more easy to discover and accessible for guests.
Increase Conversion
Enrich the guest journey to convert online store guests into paying customers.
Reduce Cart Click-through
Reduce the amount of click a guest have to make to selection all shipping, warranties and payment options to complete a purchase.
The Problem
Customer Support Mid-Purchase — Purchasing product protection is not intuitive
Poor education and accessibility to product warranty mean that users will either have to call a sale representative to clarify the options, which has proven inconvenient for guests and halts decision making.
High Cart Abandonment Rate — Shipping and financing options are not accessible.
The complex shipping options and lack of visibility to financing is a hindrance to complete a purchase.
Aurora — “ I wish I knew about the options to apply for financing online so I can complete my purchase without having to go to the physical store and have a sales representative do it for me.
Approaching the Problem — Validate, Define, Ideate
Phase 1 — Competitive Analysis
Looking out there at benchmark brands and getting a good idea of how they have addressed similar problems.
Phase 2 — User Survey (Voice of Guest)
Following the analysis, we paired the benchmark experience with 10 experience questions in relation to the overarching problem, and conducted a user survey of 50 customer to validate our assumptions.
Phase 3 — Ideation
Powered with the qualitative and quantitative data, and an understanding of our guest needs, we administered an ideation workshop to determine how we might solve the underlying problem.
Solutioning
Idea 1/5 — What if we call attention to Free Shipping, Protection Plan and Financing options on PDP?
The additions increased guest confidence in decision making.
Idea 2/5 — What if we call attention to Protection Plan in mini-cart when gets add item to their shopping cart?
To encouraged to learn more about protection plan and adding it to their purchase.
Idea 3/5 — What if we give guest the ability to add or remove product specific Protection Plan in their shopping cart?
To reduce the rate in customer support calls mid-purchase.
Idea 4/5 — What if we still show guests all the shipping options but include an info icon to educate them on what each shipping option offers?
Idea 5/5 — What if we let guests choose their payment method before checkout where they can choose to finance or pay with credit card?
To reduce abandoned cart rate.
Challenges
Hard Business Requirements
There are several non-negotiable requirements from the business side such as ensuring all shipping options are visible at all times. Ability to add and remove protection plans and highlighting financing UX or not.
If we can't override it, it's not much of a solution.
Because Dufresne runs on ShopifyPlus, it is important that we design our solution within the capabilities of Shopify's out-of-the-box experience.
It's not fair on fairstone's timeline.
While designing the new shopping cart experience, it is important that we are working closely with Fairstone to facilitate the financing application section of the experience. However, they were also building a new plug and play experience clashing with out timeline.
Lessons
Empathizing with the business
Finding a way to overlay the user needs with business needs and seeing opportunity areas mutually beneficial for both users and business.
Partnering with a dev
Devs know the platform inside out and can tell you what the constraints are.
Future-proof designs
By collaborating with Fairstone, we were able to understand their requirements and what role we can play in the experience they are working on. So we designed a socket for them to plug into.