UX/UI/PO Case Study — Re-design of My Account

Published in

Khayati Rabheru

9 min readFeb 11, 2019

Case study

SITUATION & BACKGROUND

Re-Design of ‘My account’ was one of my first projects at Currys.co.uk. My account was neglect area of the site for a long time therefore there was a lot of catch-up to do.

One of the biggest challenge was that it was one of the first UX for the Currys.co.uk. My job was to educate the business of the user centred design (UCD) process, overcoming the challenges of legacy code & systems, introducing tools such as, discovery, benchmarking, user research, review sketches & wireframes, user testing and iterative design approach. There was a lot to do in a short space of time and prove value incrementally.

At the same time the business was going through transformation from waterfall to agile ways of working. Roles and ways-of-working weren’t defined and with the development team based off-shore made asynchronous communication difficult. However, I was keen to introduce UX processes to this project and was asked to take on the extra responsibility of performing hybrid roles (Product Owner & Lead UX Architect), while things settled down.

Team:
Myself (Product Owner & Lead UX Architect)
Business Analyst
UI Designer
Scrum Team (1 Scrum-master, 3 PHP Developers, 2 Front-end developers, 2 Testers).

APPROACH

User Centred Design Process (UCD)

RESEARCH

I started off with the strategy of collecting quantitive & qualitative data from various sources. Insight & analytics, customers surveys, benchmarking & call centre incoming queries.

Research step 1

There was a lot to do, with little time. It was important to know:

Account holder vs Guest checkouts
Current number of account holders
When do the users return to the account after a purchase or recent interaction. (Note: I was limited with my request as there wasn’t enough tracking implemented across the website)

The results showed that over 90% preferred to use guest checkout over creating an account. Very small percentage of people created an account.

Almost 60% of the customers returned to the site within the first two weeks of the purchase. We assumed this was, to either track their item, look for returns information or look for help. This was the only quantitive information we had due to limited tracking implemented.

Research step 2

Working collaboratively with UX researcher I put goals and objectives together for the survey. We surveyed over 1000+ customers who regulary shop online.

Objectives:

Currently, Currys PC World customers are able to set up an online account, from where they can make purchases, store and view information about their past purchases and careplans.

We wish to get customer feedback on how the account area is performing for customers, and what can be done to encourage more customers to set up an online account with Currys PC World.

What online accounts do customers already have (with Currys PC World/other retailers)?
Why do customers set up online accounts, and what do they use them for?
What account areas and features are most important to Currys PC World customers?

Customers are most likely to have an online account with online-only retailers (e.g. Amazon, eBay) or financial/utility providers. 35% of customers have an online account with Currys PC World

69% of customers preferred signing in using their own log-in details because it is more convenient to track parcels and enables ‘quick access and advancement to check out’

Half of customers claimed that they opened an online account so that they can track their order / delivery, convenience is also key.

Research step 3

I listened to the calls from the contact centre and reviewed 5 weeks worth of data.

Summary of call and email drivers (5 weeks)

I was keen to understand the call drivers related to post purchase, it was interesting to see the Service queries, Complaints & Repair related issues customers were calling about.

Is my warranty (Careplan) valid or did I purchase extended warranty with the product?
Where is my product? Delivery status.
Failed delivery, installation & damaged product etc
How to book a repair and track its status?

It was clear what customers were expecting (product tracking, account management, purchased services, visual look feel was dated etc..) and it was evident why customers were calling. I used various research methods to find patterns and trends of customer pain-points.

Research step 4

The purpose of this research step was to understand what are the competitors doing in this space. I looked at Argos, M&S, John Lewis & Amazon retailers, without doubt Amazon was at the top of the list with vast amount of self-serve options it offered its customers. Whereas others were still playing catch-up and it was interesting to see that product tracking across all channels (online & in-store) wasn’t available or accurate. Except Amazon, the warranty information for products wasn’t available.

Backlog and MVP (Minimum Viable Product)

Next I shared the research outcomes with the wider team and collated additional ideas for improvement. Trello was very useful to help organise all the ideas.

Given that I was new to the Product Owner role, it took a couple of iterations to prioritise the features in the backlog and come up with the MVP.

The purpose of the MVP was to lay the foundation so its easy to enhance the experience further later as we add more features. I chose to tackle the re-design, tracking followed by backlog of enhancements.

Re-design of the ‘My Account’ section
Accurate tracking information & order statuses
Re-design on Manage my details section

Some of the other features in the backlog:

Warranty & extended warranty information
Order statuses (Product progress status prior and after been disptached)
Save for later (ability to save items to purchase later, monitor price-drop etc)
On-click purchase
Repairs and manage its tracking
Favourite stores and manage stock alerts
E-recipts & e-refunds (Online & in-store purchases to be managed in the account)
Many more in the Trello board image (as shown above)

Once the MVP was finalised, it was tough slicing the features into very small features so the development team could manage to deliver something at the end of the sprint, smaller increments to reduce risk.

I shared this proposal with the business stakeholders and the development team to show explained the rational behind the prioritisation. The initial feedback from the developers suggested the MVP was large and it could be broken down further to deliver value early.

I believed this was valid point and agreed the MVP to consist of re-designing My Account & introducing tracking information (link out to thrid party couriers). Release this to customers and deliver value early.

Sketches and Wireframes

I had begun sketching the customer journey for My Account in parallel to planning the MVP and liaising with stakeholders, to allow me with enough time for iteration and testing.

I gathered initial feedback from the team and began wire-framing using Omnigraffle. The Curry.co.uk website is responsive so, the design always needs for consider all breakpoints. I took the mobile first approach because its the most challenging screen size, followed by tablet and desktop.

Displaying tracking information together with orders statuses was challenging because based on the product we used over 25 couriers for delivery and they were selected based on the product ordered.

Order statuses was something we used internally but once the product was dispatched we didn’t always recieve all the information back from the couriers. Hence why the challenge of displaying accurate tracking in the account. The order statuses used internally weren’t user friendly, therefore I had to go through the exercise of understanding what each one meant and map it with a user friendly term and this what was displayed to the customer.

In the design process we considered some of the features (Order statuses, warranty information) weren’t part of the MVP, this was because we could be couple of sometimes ahead in the process to allow time for discussion with stakeholders, iteration, user-story creation etc.

Visuals designs

After a few iterations, the next step was to create visual designs. I worked closely with the UI Designer to ensure we were on the same page and she was aware of the thinking behind this approach and we were happy before presenting to the stakeholders & devs.

Expert Review

Once we completed the visual designs, we prototyped the journey and arranged an expert review. The review was conducted by an external agency using Nielsen’s heuristics.

Iteration

I amended to the following:

Main navigation link to home
Section headers with better contrast
Preferences light-box changed to toggles
Manage my details section didn’t open to a default page of Billing address.
Improved the display of warranty (Care Plan) information

User testing

Next we took the changes through to user testing, in a lab environment. With tasks & think aloud revolving around the objectives set below.

User testing results indicated:

Some improvements were required to the copy used (as this was a prototype the copy was fully defined).
The home delivery & in-store orders separation didn’t work as expected. They hoped to see them all grouped with most recent first.
The overall journey between the sections was seamless & customers appreciated the simplicity.

Results & Learnings

I learned a lot through this project, was certainly out of my comfort zone while doing the dual role for this project.

Results:

Customers appreciated the intuitive design and the ability to track orders & view warranty information. We saw this from the uplift in the NPS scores and through online feedback.
Customers realised the value and benefits, we saw an increase for account creations by 5%.
We saw reduction in the number of calls requesting tracking and warranty related information, this left advisors with more time to deal with more complex issues.
Despite various ups and downs, this project set good example for the other streams on how embed UX into Agile ways of working.
Finally, this project continued for much longer and we continued delivering more features such as; Save for later, price drop alerts, stock availability, archived orders, email template improvements & GDPR compliance.

Key learnings:

Importance of saying ‘NO’ when requests flow in from all directions. This helped me and the team focused on what was important and what we had committed to delivering the business.
How to overcome lastminute technical constraints. Some elements of the designs couldn’t be delivered in the way we had envisaged due to legacy code, platform limitations & third party systems etc.
Long distance working relationship was very challenging, as highlight above the team consisted of PHP developers and Front-end developers. We would be sometimes be juggling multiple features in one sprints due to both teams not being in sync. This led us not to be very efficient and productive at times.
When dealing with number of stakeholders and technical constraints, its easy to lose track of the bigger picture. Keeping the team and the business informed of the vision and long & short term goals can be very beneficial.
I was mindful of other streams working on other parts of the site and at some point when we were close to completing our development we would need to merge the code, ensure we are in sync from an experience point of view, re-test the new features together with core purchase journeys and complete user acceptance testing (UAT) with wider stakeholders in the business

I hope you enjoyed reading the case study as much as I enjoyed writing it. I would appreciate any feedback! Say hello to me at khayati_r@yahoo.co.uk or connect with me on LinkedIn.