Case Study: Lean Data Informed Design to increase User Engagement
Mission: To make the Overall Home-buying Experience a Breeze
Problem: High Bounce Rates and Lower Retention were affecting badly with our overall lead conversions.
Most of the “Extra Features” were almost undiscovered by the users.
Fast Forward: Design Team to the Rescue.
We decided to understand the problem. We wanted to understand real reason of high bounce rates, because from first glance it all seemed well. We had just one button on Homepage i.e. “Get Started” and it was quite clear what we wanted users to do. Don’t confuse users, be clear, they say, Right?
Maybe that’s not how it works in Home-buying. We wondered…
Hence we created a complete plan to talk to actual users, dig for clues in our endless analytics data
and involved other indirect stakeholders to probe the problem.
Process we Adopted
We adopted a standard Lean Data Informed Design Process. We made a strict policy of No-Assumptions until we finish the User Research stage and Unlearned in order to get insights from the process that we never had before.
We made sure to connect with the user on empathetic level to help them help us design a better experience for them.
It was continous loop where we often jumped back into sketching stage to come up with better iterations.
Requirement Gathering
After rigorous usability testing sessions, user interviews, stakeholder focus groups, heuristic analysis, data analysis, behavioural analysis and 5-Sec Tests we narrowed down our aim or requirements to few points.
Deep Empathy: To make the website more emphatic to user’s emotions and must give an overall better feeling to promote homebuying by establishing trust with visuals.
Affirmative Action: Get user started with an action towards overall search. It helps in setting an expectations of what to expect next.
Move to White: Multiple conclusions from studies stated that users preferred white background than a black one. Color Psychology also favours use of white in such website.
Discoverability: Other sections like special deals, collections needed to be more discoverable by the users. Currently they were just there in menu bar.
Mobile App Showcase: We also launched our mobile app in this duration for iOS and Android which we needed to showcase somehow to let users know about it.
Engaging: High Bounce rates, lower retention pointed towards the fact that page was not engaging enough for users.
Aesthetically Better: And obviously, new homepage needed to be a greater leap from previous one in terms of aesthetics.
Sketching
- We did few short sprints for sketching multiple ideas.
- Narrowed down to the best voted ideas and then voted on them again internally.
- Involved stakeholders to vote again on the 2nd level ideas.
- Winner was then made into full sketch to lay down the elements.
- Till this point we preferred nothing fancy and focused on information hierarchy and usability.
We were now ready to dive into high-fidelity mockups.
Final Design
- After over 15 iterations and continous feedbacks we landed on a final iteration.
- It was a completely agile process and we made sure we stuck to the requirements that we gathered.
- Result was a much cleaner more usable page.
- We experimented with over 30 images to choose a non distracting yet empathetic banner image.
- Ample of white space was added.
What we learnt: Data and UX Research when combined make an atom bomb of insights
With minimal assumptions and pre-conceived notions, we let the usabililty studies and data drive our decision.
With the user requirements, we gave equal emphasis to business requirements.
No matter how satisfied you are with your design initially, there is always a room of improvement and
you need to do multiple feedback sessions to unlock that potential. (Yes! we thought out initial design
was all we could do with the requirements, but as you would notice, Boy! Were we wrong! )
A lot of times use of a lot of icons and graphics may seem the way to go for us creative heads, but
humans tend to favour most to another humans. Specially in case of decisions like buying a home.
Last but not the least,
Data is Fun
There is so much to learn about your users is what we learnt when we extensively used Google Analytics,
CrazyEgg, SmartZoom, and took help of internal data analytics team.
So that’s it for now folks. We will keep bringing you the inside stories of how HDFC RED Design team is helping achieve the RED’s mission of making Home-buying an exciting and easy experience for users.
