Apr 4, 2016

Case Study: Search Style New Sign Up Process

Search Style allows you to find street fashion trends around the world & connect with an international community of fashion lovers, bloggers and brands.

Brief

“Our Edit Profile page sucks we need it to be super easy for site visitors to sign up. It needs to look exciting! We’re currently trying to increase our usership, and don’t want to have to worry about losing potential users at the first hurdle. After the landing page, the Edit Profile page is the second page the user sees. It needs to hint at what’s to come in terms of website content, and the input form shouldn’t feel daunting. Eg. It could be a step by step system, sections of grouped information, or maybe something else up to you. Target Devices: desktop and mobile” — The Client Search Style

Duration / Team

2 weeks sprint / 3 team members

Applied Methods

Competitor & Business Analysis
User interviews, Survey
Contextual Enquiry
Card Sorting
Personas
User Flows, User Journey
Design Studio
Paper prototype, Digital Wireframes
Usability Testing

We worked in an agile way and applied the double diamond design process where we researched for a week and then designed for another week. We then had a couple of days to wrap up everything and present to the client.

Business Analysis & Market Research

We began by getting to know Search Style and the competitors. After extensive research we found out that Search Style has one unique feature that none of the others have — the fashion map. The Search Style Fashion map helps you find popular styles in different cities and allows you to create your own fashion footprint around the globe. We wanted to work on emphasising on the fashion map as we believed it was the USP (unique selling proposition).

We looked into the Google Analytics and noticed that there’s a 100% drop out after visiting the home page. This was very worrying and we wanted to find out why it is happening.

Currently you need to add a #SearchStyle to your Instagram pictures, so that they appear on your Search Style profile. This is the only way to add a picture to the Search Style feed, which means that users need to have an Instagram account to post on Search Style. Also, the only way to sign up is with Instagram. We couldn’t see how this is helping Search Style and thought it’s confusing and complicated.

Contextual Inquiry & User Journey

However, we didn’t want to make assumptions and instead we decided to put users in front of the website and give them a simple task, which was to sign up to Search Style and post a picture.

It turned out that on average it takes people 4 min to sign in to Instagram and 11 minutes all together to create profile and complete task. Because Search Style is a website users are asked to log into Instagram through the browser not the mobile app. It creates an issue as users usually don’t remember their Instagram password as they have created their account a few years ago and use the mobile app. Users were confused how to post a picture and had to read ‘How it works’ page once again to understand.

This is when we realised that Search Style has no data from Google Analytics because Instagram leads you away from the Search Style page.

Problem

Search Style is losing users because of frustration around signing up and confusion about how to use the website.

Survey & Interviews

At this stage we were hoping to find out more about what our users base is like, what their shopping habits are, where do they look for fashion inspiration, what are their needs, motivations and frustrations. We also wanted to know what their signup preferences are and what they usually like to personalise on their profiles.

We got 69 survey responses all from people interested in fashion. Some of the key findings were that 3/4 of people preferred to sign in to website with Facebook or email, also people indicated Profile Picture, Notification Settings, Name/Bio as the most changeable aspects of a profile.

We conducted 11 interviews with those survey respondents and existing Search Style users who met the criteria of being either fashion lovers, bloggers, or brand representatives, aiming to gather more qualitative data about their preferences and frustrations, needs and aspirations. Some of the key findings include:

“I hate it when my only option is using my email.” — Alicia, 21, fashion blogger

“It’s annoying when you do a quick sign up with social media and then you’re asked to enter this info again!” — Lexi, 25, art editor

Personas

Personas are representations of different user types. The personas we created are based on the data we collected during the survey and interview sessions. We combine the trends we found concerning users needs, frustrations and character traits.

Paan Chao — Fashion Lover

Naomi Robbins — Fashion Blogger

Philip James — Brand Representative

Combining the business and user needs, we decided to concentrate on 2 primary personas — Paan the fashion lover and Naomi the fashion blogger. The brand persona would be useful in further development of Search Style once they manage to grow the user base, which will make brands interested in the platform. We designed with Paan and Naomi in mind and always referred to them as core users.

Competitive Analysis & Feature Prioritisation

Once again we looked into direct and indirect competitors and carried out an in depth analysis of what other companies are offering to their users during the signup process. Below are some of the products that inspired us.

When analysing the competitors we made a selection of features, which we then prioritised having Paan and Naomi in mind (or in other words based on our survey and interview findings). Equally we considered Search Style’s business goals and objectives. The features below are the ones we wanted to adopt for Search Style. Just a few quick examples of what we liked are Asos’s tags, Villoid’s follow suggestions, Twitter’s step by step sign up. As mentioned earlier, no one else has the style map and as a unique feature we wanted to work on emphasising it.

One thing that was coming up again and again was that all companies had an on boarding sign up process different from edit profile and account settings (which were also two separate things). We carried out a card sorting exercise with 5 participants to better understand how people make sense of edit profile and account settings and what information do they associate with each. Below are the results, which guided the grouping of information under each section in our designs.

Proposed Solution

Currently Search Style only has ‘Edit Profile’ page, which also serves as a signup page. Based on the research we conducted our proposal is to:

redesign the sign up process to allow other options to sign up with the website (social media, email), so that people don’t get frustrated.
allow the users to connect with instagram at a later time, after they create an account
integrate ‘how it works’ in the sign up process to eliminate confusion and explain the fashion map (which is Search Styles unique selling point)

This will allow users to experience the website without the unnecessary hassle of remembering their instagram password and by helping them better understand the great features of the website. We believe this will lead to an increase in the amount of users and overall usage of Search Style.

Design Studio

We facilitated 2 design studios, which were aimed at generating ideas quickly. They consisted of few rounds of sketching and then picking the best designs.The first one, where we worked with Search Style’s stakeholders, was focused on edit profile & account settings pages, while the second one was focused on the on boarding process — the sign up. The result was our first paper prototype.

Testing and Iterations

We tested our prototypes with a total of 19 people, who we met throughout London and conducted Guerilla testing in St. Paul’s shopping area. We received a lot of helpful feedback which helped us with our iterations.

Here are a few examples of the iterations based on user feedback.

One of the testers said: *“Am I just a user? This means I’m ‘a random’…which is the worst.”* A lot of people said they didn’t know what the difference between ‘a user’ and ‘a blogger’ is. We initially changed the term ‘User’ to ‘Fashionista’ but that didn’t test well as people said it’s outdated and feminine, so we changed it to ‘Fashion Lover’.

As part of the sign up process we recommended people to start following other fashion lovers and bloggers around the world. During testing we found out that people want to see more about the recommended people before they click to follow them. So we added a quick profile preview to let users see what their styles are like in a quick and easy way.

Testers were confused with how long the signup process was so we added step numbers at the top, to let people know how far along they are in the process.

Testers questioned why their Date of Birth appeared at the end and not with the initial ‘About You’ page, so we moved the DOB field and made the interface easier.

Testers were confused when the process of signup up was completed, so we created a notification to let them know their profile has been created.

Mockups & Clickable Prototype

Have a look at the clickable prototype.

Summary & Next Steps

We believe that our proposed solutions will help users to easily create their profile on Search Style, quickly understand how Search Style works and get posting their street style photos immediately. The new designs will allow the client to:

track users behaviour through Google Analytics
gather big data with the new user generated tags that we introduced
most importantly gain many new user

As happy as we are with the work we’ve done and what we accomplished, this is the ‘first sprint’. There are a few things that we would suggest for the next steps. Please note that the following recommendations are based on the user research results.

1) We propose a new feature that allows users to filter the style feed page (currently named #SEARCHTYLE at your website) by tags. These are the tags that we’ve introduced in the sign up process, which are two types — personal style tags (associated with profile) & image tags (associated with the images users upload).

2) We recommend the creation of a separate signup for brand representatives.

3) We recommed the development of a mobile app sooner than next year as planned.