Re-imagining online shopping
The story of decoding shoppertainment: A user research study
This UXR study was conducted by Rini Roy, Paramita Barua and Nishita Chowdhari as a preliminary study to better understand how users perceive shopping + entertainment products.
How it all began
With users rapidly moving to online modes of shopping, it becomes essential to provide a unique experience to stand out. Earlier, content consumption and a user’s shopping journey existed in silos. Recently, however, there is a move by e-commerce platforms to incorporate entertainment and social media platforms towards creating marketplaces. There is an opportunity here to marry the two and create an experience that can address the users’ need for both.
Currently, we have a user base which consumes content and also understands how e-commerce operates.
Therefore, we can utilise this opportunity in a way that can not only engage our users but also provide a path to increasing our revenue. Hence, online shopping while getting entertained seems like the way forward.
Our objectives with this research study were:
- Understanding the premise of shoppertainment and what it encompasses.
- To decode ‘trend-first shoppertainment’ as a value proposition.
- To understand what is entertaining content for our users in the context of shopping.
Entertainment on the go has become integral:
From traveling, to exercising, to taking a break from work, snackible content is accessed. With an uptick in busy lifestyles, the time invested in content gets shorter and shorter. On speaking to users, we realised that:
People don’t necessarily want to watch long form content, they want to consume a variety of content in a short amount of time. Social media has created the need and demand for bite sized content.
How social media has changed our content consumption:
- Tiktok changed how we consume content by introducing short videos with repeated vertical scrolls.
- This was further compounded by Instagram introducing Reels and Youtube introducing Shorts.
This short video format provides users with quick and easy content that requires less attention and provides faster updates. Short video content that is personalized to the consumers’ interest adds to their entertainment.
Internally our team decided to create a Roposo app feed based on the above principle of creating bite sized content and adding the shopping element to it giving rise to shoppertainment, a word coined from shopping + entertainment.
What is considered a trend first platform?
A ‘trend-first’ destination can be described as a place where we can learn about new trends and find out what is trending. In the context of shoppertainment, accessing a ‘trend-first’ destination informs users about what are the latest fashion trends and also allow users to purchase.
Our existing Roposo users already consider the platform a place to stay informed about the newest trending topics.
To this end, we decided to go trend first for our shoppertainment feed, given our learnings from the global market and our intended target audience being Gen Z and millenial users.
Post launching such a unique product, we wanted to gauge both Roposo and non users reactions, thereby giving rise to research.
Getting started
- Users’ current shopping behaviour and content consumption: While conducting this study, we considered how our users generally shop (online vs. offline; need based vs. impulse out) to get a better understanding of their profile.
- Relevance of trend-first platform: To gauge the relevance of creating a trend- first platform for the users and understand their reactions and need for it.
- User perception and relevance of shoppertainment: To get insights on how our users perceive our primary value proposition of shoppertainment.
Our UXR process
We conducted qualitative user research to understand the proposition of ‘shoppertainment’ for our users online via video calls. With a mixed group of Roposo app users and non Roposo app users, we sought to understand more through in depth discussions.
Methodology
We conducted interviews with our participants while exposing them to our ongoing, iterative ‘shoppertainment’ screens. The users were instructed to open the feed and browse through it and share their thoughts.
We employed the following steps during these sessions:
- Think aloud: While scrolling through the feed, our users were asked to speak out loud their spontaneous thoughts.
- Open ended discussions: Based on a guide and on how the users responded, questions pertaining to our core research objectives
- Observations: Based on the moderator’s observation of how the users browsed through the feed, where they paused, where they scrolled, further probing was done.
What we gathered i.e. our research findings
1. How do users shop?
Currently, several users shop with an intent on an e-commerce app i.e. when users most often look for specific items and make these purchases. Impulsive shopping is more likely to happen on Instagram while watching a video and serendipitously discovering an interesting product.
2. Key learnings from user interviews:
1. What do users find entertaining in the context of shopping?
When looking at entertainment from a shopping perspective, users pointed out several key needs from shoppertainment content:
- Product focused: Information and knowledge about the product shared in an ‘entertaining’ manner engages the user.
- This information should be about — new product launches, what’s trending, price, product usage and styling ideas.
2. How do they perceive video shopping?
Video shopping as a concept is exciting and users opined emotional and functional benefits:
- More engaging than pictures or text
- Evokes emotions & triggers imagination around the product
- Helps in understanding the product (especially for fashion and quirky products)
3. Why go trend first?
- Under the context of shopping, users expect to see what’s trending.
- This perception is in part due to their existing experience with the Roposo platform for Roposo users.
- Leveraging these trends enable the users stay current and relevant.
4. What type of trends work for our users?
Trends which cut across region have universal appeal. For eg- Region specific trends such as Khala Ghoda (an art festival based in Mumbai) are miscomprehended leading to low relevance.
Users are generally aware of national/international trends such as Valentine’s Day and therefore are likely to consume the content under it.
5. What categories appeal to our users?
Unique household products that elevate convenience in users’s daily lives have heightened appeal. Content around these categories engages.
6. What kind of content do users want to see in a video shopping format?
Users want to see short content which can be comprehended easily. Convoluted format which does not follow a sequential series of events adds to high cognitive load, thereby declining the entertainment quotient.
Until next time!
User research is an iterative, ongoing process. The end goal of any study isn’t to have definitive answers on how users would behave but provide access to understanding our users on a deeper level and in turn deliver the best product to them.
This research shed light on the fact that relevant and personalised content is the need of the hour, therefore generating content according our users’ choice is paramount. Hence our future endeavour in research would be to understand what type of content we should be posting on our platform to drive engagement and transaction.
Through this research study, we were able to get meaningful insights into how our users consume content and their shopping behaviours. This study also helped us see how ‘shoppertainment’ is received by our users as a concept and more specifically how they react to it on our platform. Hope this was an engaging read!
