Want to Ramp Up Your E-Commerce User Research?
We made a handy framework to help you get started.
E-commerce has perhaps the most tangible relationship between UX and business impact, as a seamless experience translates into increased conversion rates and a healthier bottom line. The world leaders in online retailers such as Amazon, Nike, Neiman Marcus, and HSN all provide users with an experience that makes it easier than ever to purchase from their websites.
What drives these great user experiences? Great user research.
As you conduct user research to craft an e-commerce experience, it can be overwhelming. Do you start with interviews? Market assessments? Personas? What information do you already have, and what is important to yet be gathered?
At Granify, we developed a framework for planning focus areas in the user research process. This framework will allow you to:
- Easily audit areas of strength and opportunity in your current knowledge base
- Identify the highest-value time investments for your team
- Optimize your process in preparing solutions for retail e-commerce
The USE Research Planning Method
We call this framework USE: User > Store > Ecosystem. As the goal is to focus your research efforts, it is visualized as a target. The User is kept at the core of the framework, as their needs should drive the design decisions. From there, the Store and Ecosystem make up the middle and outer rings. Each ring can, if you choose, be further divided into quantitative (generally speaking, data and statistics) and qualitative (generally speaking, thoughts and opinions) subsections.
Let’s get started with the Ecosystem and work our way in.
Outer Ring: The Ecosystem
This layer of the target is the broadest in scope and generally offers the easiest immediate access to research materials. The ecosystem refers to the high-level aspects of the retail environment you are designing for: the vertical, the economy, the buyer attitudes, and the trends for the world your store and customers inhabit.
You can gather valuable information at this stage from research aggregators such as eMarketer and Statista (though a subscription may be required for more in-depth insights).
Middle Ring: The Store
What makes your store unique? How is your checkout process performing? Where are your shoppers coming from? Store-level research involves digging into the product, the pricing model, your brand, marketing efforts, and any other initiatives that could impact your users’ experience across channels.
When researching your own store, it is crucial to leverage experts in your organization who touch a range of aspects of the business (finance, merchandising, marketing, IT, and more). If you’re already involved in these areas, all the better! If not, go in with a clear ask of what you need to know, to optimize the time of the team members who will be collaborating with you.
The Center of It All: the User
We place the user at the center of this target because the user (shoppers in e-commerce) should be at the core of all of your UX decisions.
This level of research can be the most intense and requires some practice to gain comfort with. But direct user research is where you will gain the information that allows you to create the best possible experience for every shopper.
Identify your most important user personas or archetypes, but always remember that each shopper is a person, not a persona. If you are working in an agile framework and building in tandem with ongoing research, have real people test your prototypes to learn what works and what doesn’t.
Putting It All Together
Plot the pieces of information you already have on the appropriate level of the target. This allows you to make assessments on the risks and rewards of pursuing more information in each category.
The world of online retail moves so fast that it’s impossible to fill every gap every time. What this framework allows you to do is move fast, knowing that you spent your valuable research time on the most important opportunities for your shoppers. If this story helps you out, or if you have any techniques you’ve used for your own user research projects, I would love to hear about it in the comments.
This is a condensed version of a post originally written for the Granify blog. You can read the full version here.
