Uniqlo Pitch Retrospective

Charlotte Lee
Jul 30, 2017 · 5 min read

The brief for Project 4 is to deliver a pitch for Uniqlo’s with the purpose of improving the navigation and search functions of the existing website and mobile app.

The objective of redesign is to drive online sales and tap into the profitable market, due to the changing consumer’s behaviour whereby there’s a growing number of consumers shopping on e-commerce website rather then physical stores. As mentioned by the CEO of Uniqlo, Mr. Tadashi Yanai, the current online sales only account for 5% of the total sales. Uniqlo is aiming to expand this figure to 30%.

Together with my teammates, Fareed, Alex and Ek Neng, we commenced on the project, each taking on a dedicated role. For me I’m focusing on the User Interface design, working alongside with Alex (Interaction design and programming) to deliver a functioning and responsive prototype that is interchangeable between mobile phone and website. Fareed will focus on the research component, while Ek Neng will oversee the project management.

Surveys, User Interviews and Usability Testing

We kick start the project by drafting and sending out the online surveys to gather quantitative data from our users. While pending for the surveys results, we also crafted out the interview questions and conducted user testing on Uniqlo’s existing website and one of the most popular local e-commerce website, Zalora to compare the results.

From the surveys and user interviews, what we have gathered is that there’s a high demand for online shopping. 84% of the users feedback that they shop online. When we enquire about the behaviour, convenience and promotions were the 2 mains reasons given for their motivation to shop online.

We also enquired those who indicated that they do not shop online, what are the factors that deter them. We have discovered that they were concern about the fitting and materials of clothing, as they could not try out and feel the material of clothing from the website.

For the usability test, we asked our participants to perform similar tasks on Uniqlo and Zalora website. Thereafter, we apply the following 3 metrics to compare the findings from both websites:

  1. Time Taken
  2. Path Error Taken
  3. Task Success

From the usability test findings, we concluded that users perform significantly better on Zalora as compared to Uniqlo.

Competitive Analysis

Next, we did a Competitive Analysis with Asos, Cotton-on and Zalora to identify the reasons why Uniqlo is falling behind on its performance. We discovered that the search and navigation of Uniqlo’s website were not as intuitive as compared to our competitors. The issue was also raised by several usability participants, who expressed difficulties finding content relevant to them.

Personas

With the market research and user research findings, we did an affinity mapping and developed the following 4 personas:

Since Uniqlo is a foreign brand, to entice the local market, it will helps in our understanding to learn what are the concerns and characteristics of the local consumers. Hence the personas developed have localised characteristics to reflect the local consumer’s behaviour.

Aligning the findings from our research, we would like to prioritise persona 1 and 2 whose priorities are price and convenience.

Summary of Findings

While there’s a huge market opportunity for online shopping, users are NOT choosing UNIQLO as their preferred online store over others

Our Strategy

To increase online revenue, we will enhance the online experience to motivate customers to purchase products online.

Ideation

With the personas developed, we proceed to work on ideation with sketches and wireframe.

We organised the content for clearer navigations and curate promotions for the relevant categories.

We also looked into the sort and filter functions and expanded on the existing filters with more options that cater to users’ need according to results gathered from the user research.

With the redesign, we effectively reduce time taken for users to complete the task and thereby, reduce users unhappiness and thus, will promote online sales as users can easily and effectively find what they need online.

With the given 6 months timeframe, the first 2 months will be focusing on intensive and in-depth research with reference to the company’s data analytics to solidify our preliminary findings. For the subsequent months, we will carry out sprints to continuously execute and iterate features gathered from the user research and usability testing.

Apart from the given 6 months timeframe, we also prepared proposal to expand the collaboration to 12 months and 2 years with different packages where we can look beyond the web design to Uniqlo’s service design and delivery process, which were identified during our preliminary research to be other factors deterring users from shopping online.

Key Takeaways

P4 have been the most productive UX project for me so far. Given the dedicated roles and good combination of skills, we were able to complete work ahead of time and have ample time to prepare for our presentation. The mock presentation session that we did with other teams have also been good in preparing ourselves for a more polished presentation on Friday.

From P4, I have learnt how to deliver a pitch and have enjoyed and gained valuable experiences working with my Yellow Pencil team members.

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