Research, Design, Repeat
I’ve hit the midway point of my intensive course and we have just completed quite possibly the most strenuous unit. The difficulty came not from the subject matter and focus of this unit, which was primarily learning more about research techniques, information architecture, and heuristics to name a few, but from the amount of time we had to complete everything which was about six days. The challenge this time was to redesign a website and make it user-friendly. Half the project was with a group and the other was solo. I had to rely on what I learned in previous weeks and put together a presentation where I can competently explain the research I did and my findings.
Muji: Minimal Design, Major Mystery
My group was assigned to look into the e-commerce website for Muji. Muji is a brand that’s known for products that emphasize simplicity. It has a wide variety of ranging from clothing and furniture to stationery and storage items. Overall Muji has a very focused inventory that offers only what you need.
Muji has a diverse inventory but it is not displayed very well on its website. There are a number of user-friendly issues with the Muji website but the primary issue is that it is next to impossible to find anything. A lot of the products featured on Muji’s website are either buried under at most three sub-categories or hidden amongst items that are identical with minor differences such as color. This might not seem like a big problem but when you have to go from one menu to a second to a third only to find a page of 20 plus items that you have to manually sort through and decipher, you more than likely will not want to buy anything.
So after working with my group to do all the preliminary research into the company which included applying newly learned concepts of competitors and comparators, task flows, and user flows. Ultimately these were tools that allowed me to look at what Muji has, what it lacks in comparison to other businesses, and what I could adapt from these same businesses to improve Muji’s e-commerce shopping experience.
Start at the Top
Initially, when I looked at the Muji website, I found that the major and most pressing problem was, as I mentioned earlier, finding items. One thing that stood out amongst everything was the navigation bar. A lot of the categories were spread out and separated to give the illusion of an expansive inventory of items when that was not the case.
To fix this I decided to do two things: condense the primary navigation by moving primary categories and making them secondary categories and also (depending on the category) making the secondary navigation live on the same page as the inventory of items.
I tested 3 users to see how effective this tiny change in infrastructure made compared to the previous version. Remarkably, users were able to find and locate items with little to no difficulty. The prototype that they navigate through had no pictures and was grayscale to avoid distracting them. The only thing that users were able to rely on was the copy that was present on the site. In spite of the handicap, users were able to complete the three tasks I provided them with. However, I inadvertently created a new problem. For the first round of changes I made ‘Storage & Organizers’ a primary category and moved ‘Kitchen’ and ‘Bathroom’ under ‘Furniture and Interior’.
When I did this, I moved ‘Bags & Luggage’ from it’s original position under ‘Apparel’ to this newly promoted category. What I came to find was that this was not intuitive for the users that I tested. All of my users hesitated when they started their task which was to find a suitcase(which was located under ‘Bags and Luggage’)and add it to their cart. Compared to the other two tasks that I gave, it took too long to find the suitcase. So for the second iteration, I demoted ‘Storage & Organizers’ to a secondary category and promoted ‘Bags & Luggage’ to a primary.
By doing this I was able to eliminate the majority of the problems listed above because of an insight I pulled from the second round of user testing that I did where I inserted pictures and color into the prototype. That insight was that:
It was something so tiny that made the most difference in how users navigated this website. So essentially this happened:
The users I tested never mentioned the extensive list of items as a worry. In fact, because of the secondary categories that were now located at the top of the list of results, it was not a concern. Users noticed the number of items they would have had to look through but ignored it because of the picture indicators that allowed them to narrow down the results.
Mystery Solved…Sort of
Normally this is where I would say that I solved the problem with the website and went on to report my findings with no further issues….not so much. Much like my first round of testing, I inadvertently created another problem. While the images helped to ease navigation issues, the categories for one department was not as intuitive as another that I rearranged. Users reported that it was not as easy to look through because of the image icons that were used to represent each category in the secondary navigation.
Next Steps
For the next steps in moving the Muji e-commerce site toward being user-friendlier, I would need to change the images that I used to represent each section to something that users would be able to identify more easily. From there I would move ahead and apply the changes I made to the two categories of the website to the others. I used the ‘Bags and Luggage’ category as a baseline to see if the change I had in mind would be effective. Thankfully my hypothesis proved true. Unfortunately, I have to go back to the first half of the double diamond and reexamine my findings to develop this new solution. I guess the iterative process in the field of UX is more of an infinite symbol with a hypothetical end than a double diamond with a definitive endpoint.
