Introducing user centred design

Vitsœ had an established design heritage going back to 1959 with the iconic designer Dieter Rams at the helm. However there wasn't an established user centred design practice to ensure everything that was being designed for the purchase journey met the needs of customers. I therefore worked closely with different teams from across the business to create tools that would aid user centred design as well as establishing an approach that put users into every step of the process including user needs, using Jobs To Be Done/User Stories and regular user testing.

From customer research interviews I created personas, which were also adopted by the Customer service team who found them valuable too. I also defined a set of experience principles that set the standard for every touchpoint customers interacted with at Vitsœ. These tools were used in daily conversations as well as being used in kick-offs, workshops and reviews and helped keep the customer in mind at every stage.

Pain points & opportunities

I used the personas in combination with further customer research and analytics data to create an experience map of the end-to-end service, detailing the behaviours of different personas when buying furniture and pain points/opportunity areas in the existing Vitsœ customer journey. This all went into the backlog along with many other 'ideas' that had been contributed over time from around the business.

It was a challenge knowing how to prioritise the backlog. With only a small team of just myself to design and three (very talented) Developers, we had to assess everything carefully so we worked on the most valuable problem areas. We had input from the business on priorities but it was mostly subjective and unfortunately we didn't have a product manager to guide us in the right direction. Therefore I created an assessment template and restructured the backlog to represent how much we knew about each problem area and whether further discovery work was required. We then used data to help assess the impact of each item which informed which areas to tackle first. We constantly reviewed the backlog to ensure we were always working on the most valuable problem area.

Using data & research insight to inform designs

For every problem area I used data combined with qualitative research to identify potential root causes and understand how to design an effective solution. For example for the inquiry form, a major step in the conversion funnel, we observed a low proportion of customers submitted the form so I cut the data in different ways to investigate this further eg what proportion of users who started filling in the inquiry form submitted it, how different routes to the inquiry form affected whether the user submitted it, exit rates and devices/screen sizes. I really enjoy digging into data and at Vitsœ I utilised several analytics tools such as Crazy Egg for heatmaps, Optimizely for A/B testing, Google Analytics and my favourite (if I'm allowed favourites) was Heap Analytics for lots of behavioural data.

I also conducted regular user research to observe customers using the existing UI and to test out designed improvements, both in-person, remotely with international customers and short intercept surveys online. As user research was new to Vitsœ I ensured others in the wider business had the opportunity to be involved in the research too. Other team members regularly joined research sessions (and helped with note taking) and I always shared the results widely, using research walls as a way to keep the research visible to all.

Experiment & measure. And experiment again

As a champion of the lean start up approach, I checked assumptions through a series of experiments. We had many experiments running and had to be careful that different experiments didn't skew results of others, so I adapted our backlog in Trello to include a workflow for experiments too. We kept track of experiments using hypotheses containing key metrics and any statistical significance requirements.

It was a challenge to convince stakeholders at Vitsœ about the benefits of experiments as they were wary of putting anything live that might impact Vitsœ's reputation, especially given over half of orders were from existing customers. I reduced this concern with the user testing conducted with customers before putting experiments live and for more substantial changes we piloted the end-to-end journey with the internal team first to ensure it met Vitsœ standards. For example when we changed the delivery service for the online shop, team members trialled the service from placing an order on the website to receiving the order at home.

Outcome

A series of improvements were made across the Vitsœ website that seamlessly integrated with all offline touchpoints, enhancing the customer experience and driving increased conversion rates.