Background

ASOS is a clothing retailer that combines other clothing brands with ASOS's original brand, which is loved by the student community for its low prices and great products. However, when I went to the ASOS website to browse the shopping experience, I did not feel a smooth shopping experience. I wanted to identify the user's pain points to improve the shopping experience.

Problem Statement

This is a project completed in the course of user research. The purpose of the project was to improve the shopping experience of ASOS users by studying the behavior, mental models, and purpose of online shoppers. The project focused on the shopping browsing experience of ASOS.

Research Plann

ASOS Research Plan by Liping Zheng, Northeastern Student

Stakeholders: couriers, customer service staff, and bank staff. ASOS is a retailer of clothing and cosmetics for young people, established in London in 2000.

Objective:

ASOS is a retailer that brings together makeup and apparel. Therefore, it is very wide in terms of the field of products. This project focuses on optimizing the filtering part of browsing product and the part of product details. The goal was to find out the disadvantages and advantages of the browsing apparel experience and to find a solution through research.

Research Questions

For the section on browsing the types of clothing and the details page of the clothing. We will examine these issues through the following questions.

1. What is the process for users to select products at ASOS?

2. What features are users considering when filtering their product selection?

3. What are the most important elements that users overlook when browsing product details?

4. What features are the least helpful when users are browsing the details of the apparel products.

Methodology

The research method for ASOS was mainly conducted by a survey. Our current expectation is for 10 to 15 participants to operate. Each participant is required to complete a survey of less than a few minutes in order to fit in with our study, in which the user's personal information, experience with shopping sites, preferred shopping sites, psychological profile when selecting products, and psychological profile when adding products to the shopping cart are included.

Participants

The primary characteristics of the study’s participants:

• Users who love shopping

• 20-30 years

• Interested in learning more about the ASOS brand.

• At least two hours of shopping site time per week.

Schedule

• Recruiting: Around the middle of February

• Study: Early March

• Result: Around the middle of February

Target Audience

 Design Process

Competitive Analysis / Comparative Analysis

User Survey

Regarding the user survey, I wanted to get information from the shoppers about what they needed most in their shopping experience. I wanted to collect the most important information and features for the users. This data and information can be used as the basis for my proposal for ASOS. A total of 62 people participated in this survey. I will select the important questions to present.

When you browse the product detail page, what kind of information do you think is important? Please rank the following information?

If you want to buy a sweatshirt now, please rate the importance of filter use by?

If you want to buy a pair of jeans right now, please select three important filters that you would use?

User Interview

For ASOS User:

• User A Student 3/13/2022 5pm

• User B Student 3/14/2022 5pm

For Online shopping User:

• User C Student 3/13/2022 2pm

• User D Student 3/13/2022 8pm

Key Findings

Key Finding 1: After two different groups of users responded to the most critical shopping steps in their shopping experience. Product browsing was the shopping process that all four of them agreed was the most important, which would give them a sense of validation of whether or not it was smooth throughout the shopping experience.

Among the 62 participants in the survey, 47.76% chose Product Browse as the most important step in their shopping.

Key Findings 2: According to the two groups of users, size, brand, and style are the most important filters among users for their three basic filter choices. The remaining filters, price and category each have one vote of importance in both user groups. Therefore, when considering reordering or reorganizing filters, we need to consider their importance for ranking. This is enough to allow users to find the items they want based on their needs quickly.

Among the 62 participants to choose the three most important filters, Size accounted for the highest 18.96% as one of the most important filters. 15.64% of Product Review and 14.69% of Style

Key Findings 3: According to the bad shopping experience provided by ASOS users and online shoppers, more of the bad experiences were about the dark mode subscription system and customer service. The subscription system was the most mentioned. Users disliked how the site constantly prompts for information about subscriptions and hides important information for users to subscribe to their products for weeks. The long wait for customer service afterward was also a problem that users mentioned.

Among the 62 participants who ranked the filters according to importance, 19.35% voted for the Latest release as the unimportant filter.

Recommendation

1. Available sizes are shown in the picture
   The most important feature that users care about is the size as a way to know if there is a size that they fit. Therefore, adding available sizes to product images allows users to find the product they work on faster.

2. Delete “New in Date” filter
   Remove the "New in Date" and "Latest release" filters from the current version of the filter or put them at the end so that users don't see them first but rather the filters they need.

3. Refine the types of existing filters
   ASOS can refer to Urban Outfitters and refine each category to give users a better experience. ASOS is not clear enough about the categories' names and the filters' breakdown; For example, size, ASOS can categorize the sizes of clothes and shoes instead of just stacking all the sizes together.

4. Organize the information display of detailed products
   On the product details page, add a complete body picture of the model to indicate the size of the clothes and the height of the model for users to refer to. In addition, product reviews so that users know how good or bad the product is. Finally, add similar product recommendations at the end to allow users to buy more products.

5. Reordering the Filter
   Redefine the order of filters according to the user's needs so that the user can find the type of filter they want in the first place.

Conclusion

After the ASOS project, I learned more systematically how to find usability problems from the user's perspective by creating user surveys and user interviews. In my future user research, I can use these skills to find users' pain points and needs to build a better user experience.