Making product information easier to find to help users purchase

Product

Ecommerce site for a brand selling home lighting

Insight

I always begin my research on websites with a look at what the analytics data can tell me. In this project I studied visitor recordings (using HotJar) to understand what users were actually doing in their browsing and shopping journeys and to see which parts of the page they were dwelling on (or ignoring).

One key observation was that about 80% of users who engaged with the product details pages were ignoring the text descriptions. This wasn’t surprising as despite using bullet points they looked like big blocks of text (see image below) and we know users don’t tend to read a great deal online.

The next step was to understand whether there was information in the descriptions that users would find useful but weren’t seeing — or whether it was actually considered irrelevant. I ran some user testing and one of the tasks was asking users if there was anything else they wanted to know about the product they were interested in.

Several of the users said they wanted to know basic things like the size of the lamps and the wattage of the bulbs. This information was in the descriptions but the user tests also showed they weren’t reading it enough to find this out.

In addition both visitor recordings and user testing uncovered that no one was playing the videos that took up a lot of space on the page (see above).

My solution (see the wireframe) was to break apart the description and put the key details into a specification section, which is much easier to scan and compare with other products. The text about the guarantee became it’s own section further down the page. My design also made the video smaller so it looked more like an interactive element, rather than looking like decoration or a background image.

Methods

Web analytics, visitor recordings, remote user testing