Shopping Preferences

Role: UX, UI, & Research • Timeline: 4 months • Scope: Responsive Design

BUSINESS PROBLEM

  • Successful personalization requires a 360-degree view of the customer.
  • Implicit preferences need to be validated and turned into explicit.
  • Data collected is not centralized and integrated with customers’ experience on the site.

CUSTOMER PAIN POINTS

  • Product relevancy is among top five customer pain points.
  • Random or redundant recommendations make the customer feel like “Macy’s doesn’t care.”
  • Poor product recommendations erode trust.
  • No incentive to sign in.

User Needs & Expectations

  • Save time – I want to get to relevant and personalized product offerings quicker
  • Be in control – I want to explicitly set my preferences and be able to edit them
  • Inspire me – show me things that I wouldn’t have found myself
  • Know me – recommend items in my size, brand, style, price range
  • Keep me updated – alert me about sales, events in my store, wishlist items

User Flow

Sketches

I created quick sketches to quickly explore different layouts for the shopping preferences page.

Wireframes

User Testing

  • Remote, unmoderated test
  • 8 female participants, Macy’s customers
  • 18-35, 40-60 age groups

Key Findings

  • Users expected that capturing their preferences will create a more personalized shopping experience: recommendations, filters, ads.
  • Users expected that preferences will make shopping easier and quicker.
  • Users expected that their information will not be shared with third parties.
  • Users also expected to see items outside of their preferences.
  • Users wanted to preview recommendations created based on their preferences.

Interaction

Tabbed Navigation

We used tabbed navigation to organize sections within the Preferences page. This approach enabled scalability so that new sections could be added in the future.

Image Multi-Select

To rely on recognition over recall, we used image thumbnails for categories that users could add to their favorites. We also enabled customers to multi-select items from this list.

Final Design

Next Steps

As a team, we explored different ideas on how to seamlessly collect the customer’s preferences without disrupting her shopping flow. Here are some of these concepts.

Let her add to favorites brands and categories from the browse grid

Recommend brands she might like based on her purchase history

Allow her to save sizes that she frequently uses to filter products

Find out if she shops for other people and what she buys for them