Running a Product Design Audit
One of the drawbacks of being a designer is that you are always aware of your user pain points. We notice scores of little things that we’d love to change. The problem is that they rarely get prioritised or even documented due to the fast pace of change and implementation.
What’s more, even if you think your product is perfect, people and needs change. We have seen more customers change their shopping habits from offline to online, due to things like the COVID-19 pandemic and improving mobile technology (on average, mobile makes up 68% of our sessions). We recognise how critical it is to continue to improve the Trouva.com experience with ever-changing external circumstances.
Conducting routine audits of your product should always be on the back of the mind of a designer as they are a great way to help with the problems previously listed. Lets us run you through on how we do audits at Trouva, providing a structure focused on identifying issues and pain points that consumers might face. Creating a place to track these issues, and most importantly, help consumers have a great experience.
Audits uncover content that needs updating, where gaps exist that new content could fill, and if certain pieces of content are ready for removal.
— NNgroup (https://www.nngroup.com/articles/content-audits/)
Set up the team for action
Just like a design sprint, start by making sure everyone involved has the right context. Gather stakeholders and:
- Recap on customers personas, facts and first time / returning customers flow:
As a start, gathering data (quantitative and qualitative) around our users over the past years to identify a few patterns that might be helpful for this audit (e.g., personas, quotes from usability sessions / phone calls, insight on what our customers value on trouva…) - Look into data, best practices of the industry over company goals, needs and standards practices:
When moving to a specific page, looking deeper into the categories described. Our first focal point was the product page as it is one of our most viewed and crucial pages, with +- 90% of Trouva customers seeing this page over the last year. - And finally, a report with suggestions for improvements and next steps
1. Desired pages
Like starting any good habit, it can feel impossible to start as the size of the task puts us off even beginning. Whether its joining the gym, spring cleaning the house or auditing your product, the answer is always the same: start small. In this case, pick a single screen / page to start.
As mentioned before, the product page was the selected page to start as it is normally the first contact that customers have with Trouva and has the highest reach of any page on Trouva.com, largely due to Google Shopping serving as a key acquisition channel.
Over the last months, the most recent changes to the product page were approached in an atomistic way rather than holistically. This means we only changed specific components with speed and efficiency in mind. This has resulted in identifying some problems and areas of improvement regarding our product page. This is not only limited to UX and functionality gaps from a product experience perspective, but also problems surfaced by our customers.
Best practices
Write and look for the best design practices and competitors out there. In our scenario, the goal of a product page is to sell, educate and inform multiple consumer profiles about a specific product in a way that is clear and straightforward for them. Because customers can not physically interact with the product, they need enough information to make an informed decision.
Because we attract a wide range of customers, we need to take into consideration the varying needs of our customer profiles. Currently, we have a one size fits all approach that does not consider key factors like acquisition channel, mindset (i.e., browsing mode vs purchasing mode vs gift buying mode), etc.
We want to ensure:
- The product page is harmonious and has optimal information architecture
- We are taking varying customer profiles into consideration for, potentially, varying product pages
- Customers find the right information at the right time
We want to avoid:
- Customers not being able to decide if a product meets their needs and not purchasing
- Customers buying the wrong product, being unhappy, and returning (i.e., additional cost for us)
Universally required components
- Images (clear, recognisable, multiple views)
- Product description
— Descriptive product name
— Price, including any additional product-specific charges
— Clear product options (i.e., colour/size) and ability to select
— Product availability
— Concise and informative product description - Clear actions
— Add item to basket (With the additional feedback components, if necessary)
Our advice is that even if you have all of this information very present in your minds, write it anyway! Other team members (even stakeholders), and new hires might not be aware of all this. Alignment over the goals between everyone will greatly simplify not only the auditing process but also the design process going forward. At this point, there might be also room to review, discuss and re-state your vision.
A word of warning though. Be careful about looking at competitors too much. If all we ever do is copy best practice from elsewhere, we will never innovate.
Identifying with a product category is outsourcing your strategy to the past. — Ryan Singer, Basecamp
2. Data (Quantitative and Qualitative)
At this stage, you should define a clear timeline for the analysis of all the data that’s needed to review each page. Then, you can start going deeper into each component.
Page overview
For the period from January 1st to December 29th 2020, we can see:
- The percentage of new customers that see a product page (87%)
- The percentage of users seeing a product page (+-90%)
Component breakdown
The following includes a quantitative and qualitative breakdown of key sections on the product page based on information in Google Analytics, interviews with customers, customer support, recordings and testing. For us, it was important to look deeper into every component on the page, so we split them under required components and the additional ones.
Required components:
- Images
- Description and details of the product (name, price and composition)
- Delivery and returns information
- Boutique information
- Information on sizing
Additional components:
- Gift wrapping options
- Click and Collect message
- Informative Pills
- Messaging when the product is back in stock
- Interlinking to similar / recommended products
- Brand component
- Pay with Klarna
- Shuffle
- Opening products into new tabs
- Extra information on boutique/curator
Customer Stages/Modes
Identifying the stages and modes of our clients when browsing this page is also an information that for us is a helper to take conclusions and to iterate on opportunities. For us, we identify 3 stages / modes;
- Purchase Mode
- Browse Mode
- Acquisition Channels (i.e Google Shopping, Instagram, Pinterest, etc)
3. Report
When we got to writing the actual audit report, this was our approach:
- Recap some of the main conclusions.
- Figma + notion analysis merging the UI with notes.
- List the opportunities. We started by defining our principles, to follow when doing the updates. We select the best next actions, that even with different levels of investment / stages, were things that we were certain that would be good for the customer (e.g, candidates for A/B testing or suggestions that we could release without the need to test). Identifying long term actions to progressively add into the pipeline of the design work over time.
- Next steps, that for us was to immediately iterate on 5 of our next best actions.
Final notes
This is a continuous process that can be overwhelming. We believe that it’s okay to reduce the size of this initiative and start with a ‘start-small’ mindset. We took this approach and for us start with the most frequently accessed pages, as they are the ones that are most impactful right now. The devices and browsers looked at were also the ones most used by our customers until now.
Obviously this process/strategy might not work for you, as NNgroup put it, this is not an exact science. Our goal was to share the process that worked for us and it might be convenient for other design teams too, just to start discussions around this topic.
By compiling a list of changes, it was also easier for the Product Manager to prioritise a collection of small fixes over larger projects. And hopefully our users have a smoother experience when they shop with us.
Let us know what is your approach when running product design audits!
