E-commerce platform revision
2023, Home page redesign, Desktop
Overview
This project focuses on redesigning Ruten's website homepage as part of its brand reconstruction. The goal was to enhance user experience and interaction, showcasing the company's new brand image and value proposition. The objective is to attract more users, particularly experienced users, to visit the website and improve the overall user conversion rate.
Role
Product Designer, Pei-Yu
Responsibilities
Conducting interviews
Digital wireframing
User interface design
Low and high-fidelity prototyping
Conducting usability studies
Accounting for accessibility
Iterating on designs.
Team member
Product Owner, Bruce
IT team lead, Steve
Front-end engineer, Dan / Simmy / Alice
Backend engineer, Billy /Jason / Émilie*
Data Analyst, Zhengwei (政維)
Stakeholder
Business executives, Hua (華)
Category Management, Qinghui / Yumi / Lydia / Xiaogan.
Marketing Supervisor, Zefen (澤芬)
Head of Product Department, Maik
Project Process
As the homepage serves as the primary entry point for users, in addition to the design process, we also emphasize cross-departmental feedback and collaboration in the design planning process. Therefore, we have the design and cross-departmental communication processes running concurrently.
Cross-departmental communication process
Design Process
Data Observation
From our data, we identified the pain points of our old homepage:
The bounce rate of our old homepage was 11%.
The total traffic of our event pages only accounted for 1-2%.
Only around 17% of users search for products on the homepage.
Some ad spaces had a CTR as low as 1-2%.
Competitive Research
In conducting our competitive research for e-commerce platforms, we started with a competitive analysis. This analysis helped us gain insights into the current state of homepages within the industry, including identifying the unique features.
Persona
After conducting a competitive analysis, we invited 16 users to participate in user interviews and observed their behaviors to gain insights into the behavioral patterns of our target users. Our primary focus was on experienced users in order to understand their frustrations and goals better. This research helped us identify the key user personas that we will be targeting with our product.
Pain Points
Inefficient browsing experience
The outdated homepage design with crowded text, and a cluttered structure fails to meet the needs of modern users, resulting in visitor loss and decreased conversion rates.
Difficulty finding specific products/sections
Users face frustration when trying to locate specific products or sections on the homepage.
To enhance brand image
As the brand develops, it is necessary to update and improve its image. As the showcase window for the brand image, the homepage can directly affect consumers' impression and trust in the brand.
Design Goal
As a C2C-oriented shopping platform, the design direction for optimization will be focused on the web version. The design goals are as follows:
To provide a simple, user-friendly, and efficient user experience, in order to increase conversion rates and visitor retention time.
To enhance the platform image and highlight brand advantages, to attract more visitors and increase conversion rates.
Design Strategy
Friendly and easy guidance
Our strategy is to simplify the design style and layout, provide clear navigation and presentation of content, emphasize key information and reduce interference, and facilitate data layout observation.
Build brand image
We will use new brand colors, logos, and images to present the brand's values and style. This will provide a comprehensive brand experience through theme tags and functions.
Visual Design
Personal Card
Provide users with real-time notifications of the latest information, such as new products and pre-order updates for their favorite items. Users can also set frequently visited pages as shortcut blocks for easy access.
Theme Section
Recommend popular and latest products from the top six categories to users. The category display will also automatically switch to the user's interested category section based on their browsing history.
Overseas Shopping Section
Automatically recommend relevant topics based on the user's browsing history, allowing users to explore more articles shared by enthusiasts in the Ruten online community.
Automatically recommend popular and latest products from different partner platforms, such as eBay and Gmarket, based on the user's browsing history. Users can easily purchase products from overseas partner platforms through a single website and account.
Improvement
We employ two approaches, qualitative and quantitative research, to thoroughly assess the effectiveness of the new homepage design.
Qualitative Research｜Questionnaire
We conducted user feedback surveys on the homepage by placing banner ads, divided into two stages: the first survey took place after the launch of the new homepage and the second survey took place 1 month after the launch. In total, 60% of the 1,697 users surveyed provided positive ratings for the redesign.
Quantitative Research｜Data Analysis
We compared our Click-Through Rate (CTR) of our new and old website's theme section area to see if our new website attracted more users. Based on internal data of our new website, we saw an increase of 1.63% in search page PV (Page View), 0.85% in event page PV, and 1% in shopping cart PV in the user flow ratio on the homepage. Additionally, the average CTR of the theme sections on the new homepage increased by 5.2%. (CTR = unique user clicks / unique user impressions)
My Learnings
Starting strategic projects with a pragmatic approach.
Don’t start a fire! It would help if you had a strategy to deliver “bad news” - and it takes practice.
Individual 1:1s with Leads before the team-wide research readouts help getting buy-in.
The more you engage stakeholders in every stage of the research process, the more they are willing to act upon your findings.
Final Results
Our data shows that more and more of our users like our new website redesign, which will pave the way for futher enhancements.