Summary

A UX research journey on providing added value in online shopping for our target audience.

‍

Merrell Shoes Amsterdam

Merrell shoes in Amsterdam tis he only retailer of Merrell product for the whole Benelux. They offer very specialized hiking and barefoot shoes that attract people from all over the country into this specific place. They also have a range of running and one of more casual shoes with an emphasis on comfort.
The owner realised that the new trend in hiking is the barefoot shoes and he wants to develop his business by signing a new deal for barefoot products.

For him, the challenge is to get his potential customer to know him. In a lot of discussion with new customers, he realises that people have been looking for his brand and type of shoes for a long period and only found him just now.

Understanding the customers

All this is great but who is actually buying hiking shoes in a country without mountains?

Survey & interviews

‍

We conducted a survey to understand shopping habits and what would be the most important factor for our customers. One of the key results was the web potential of the e-shop 58.8% are buying shoes online but the current webshop they own is only making up for 15% of their sales.

But buying online have one key paint point, comfort and fit.

“I have very painful feet. A good fitting and comfortable show is vital”
Survey Comment

For most people the problem will boil down to is this shoes right for me and what is the size I should get to be happy. We really had to think of a special solution to make the website compensate for that frustration.

All about Bas

‍

Bas is an active professional living in Amsterdam, that spent his life balancing between work hard and play hard outdoors. He is adventurous and down to earth. He wants to wear casual comfortable shoes in the city and durable comfortable hiking/ running shoes to meet his active goals without pain. Pain points — he bought shoes online that did not feet perfectly and after a day of hike his feet were destroyed. He also feels not taken seriously by the staff in some shops when it comes to his needs.

Defining a solution

How can we design an eCommerce experience tailored to our customer’s specific needs?

Site map and card sorting

‍

In order to create the right website, we let users prioritize category as well as defining which product should go into them.
One of the extra insight was that some category we have imagined overlap each other and could be unified.

From this research, we went ahead to define a sitemap with 6 menu button and 8 clear subcategories leaving the least important ones for the filter area.

Ideation, Wire-framing and Iterations

‍

Our project went through 8 stages during our 2.5 weeks of production.
Each time we gathered insight from different stakeholders and customers about what we should change on the next step.

For example, user feedback of the card sorting defined our content guidelines for what to include in a page, the wireframe test with the business defined website features and shopping process, our first branding test lead to colour change, and finally, prototype testing defined what user expected to happen for each element.

Our solution

At the final stage of our project, we had produced a home page with content that would help promote the physical shop.

We worked with the user to offer the catalogue experience that they expect on an eCommerce.

We tried to do a more comprehensive and attracting product page. And we had made an easy to fill checkout tunnel.

As this was our first experience with online shopping and given the conservative aspect of your client we really worked on nailing down the best e-commerce possible according to industry standard and guidelines.

Added value on the product page

In our survey and interview, we really understood that sizing, fit and comfort was the most important to our users. In order to help reduce this fear and break off buying online. We developed a system on the product page where the user can enter his fit measurement and get the exact size that is should order.
That way he can feel more confident about the shoes selected.
We also added and the area where we user can see other shoes that are matching his feet specifications.

‍

Read the whole case study on Medium.