case study

eShop Revamp

Status: Revamp is mostly launched by Ooredoo Oman. The remaining few are prioritized for the upcoming sprints with go-live estimated to be in a few weeks.

Link: https://shop.ooredoo.om

About Ooredoo

A leading international telecommunications company, with operations spanning the Middle East, North Africa, and Southeast Asia. The motto being “Enriching people’s digital lives”, Ooredoo works as a real digital enabler across markets with an aspiration to help people simplify their lives and enjoy exciting and rewarding digital experiences. In Oman, Ooredoo is the leading telecom service provider with close to 3 Million subscribers.

Business Challenge

For a few years, the eShop was only selling a single product from Ooredoo’s wide range of products. The overall perception of the eShop was bad in terms of the experience, availability, stability, and speed. The following was presented as the Business challenge to the UX team:

Increase the product portfolio of eShop hence enabling online onboarding for a larger range of products and services from Ooredoo.
The e-shop wasn’t getting enough engagement when compared to the number of traffic it had. The actual focus of this project was to convert traffic to sales.
Make the eShop one of the primary channels of sales for Ooredoo Oman.
Provide a mobile-friendly experience to online customers.
Follow the branding guidelines set by the group to improve the yearly brand score of the company.
Improve the customer Life Time Value, Purchase Frequency, Average Session Time, etc…

Design Challenge

The design challenge was defined as follows:

Provide an online shopping experience that is easy to use and fast, where products are easily discoverable, where online onboarding is easier and the experience is mobile friendly.
Additionally, improve the aesthetics of the eShop providing a delightful experience to the users.

Stakeholder Interviews

The primary purpose was to bring everyone on the same page and unite over one common goal. We interviewed stakeholders to understand what and why we are trying to achieve for the business and on what timeframe. Set expectations right regarding look and feel, functionality, and target audience. Interviewed:

Customer support team to get more insight into the problem areas that customers complain the most about.
Technology team to understand constraints and limitations.
Business team to understand the key areas of improvement to support business needs.
Customer experience team to get insights into the CSAT scores, NPS scores, etc… to identify pain points and areas of improvement.

Competitor analysis

The primary purpose was to identify essential features in the competitor’s eShop and map out their strengths and weaknesses. We identified areas that made our existing eShop less usable and perceptible than the competitor which provided a better user interface and features. We also took a look at the eShop of other telecom operators in the region, like DU, Etisalat, STC, Batelco and Vodafone. Questions we asked and analyzed were:

What are the competitors doing differently?
What works?
What doesn’t work?
Are there innovative solutions that we can borrow that will better engage our users?
Are there things they’re doing that we want to avoid?

Analyzing User Reviews

The primary purpose was to analyze the displeasure among detractors and areas for improvements. Areas of concern include

Usability
The intuitiveness of the interface
Confusing content and wording
Slowness and
Long and complicated forms
Low NPS at -5
Low CSAT at 40%

Analysing App Analytics Data

Analytics of the existing eShop helped us understand how users are currently using the product, and identify the biggest pain points they encounter based on how long they use the product and how many screens they visit. This also gave us hard evidence that helped us make specific recommendations for where to focus the efforts of our redesign. Areas of concern include

Low conversion rate of 0.5%
Low Add-to-Cart rate of 3%
High Cart Abandonment of 93%
High Average Page Load Time of 16 seconds
Low Average pages per session at 2
Low Average session duration of 50 seconds
Higher Bounce Rate of 85%
Average Order Value at 3 OMR

UX Audit

A usability audit, where the eShop’s user interface was evaluated. It helped identify usability problems and detect problematic areas that make users abandon their journey and leave. The audit revealed that users lack information about the product, its delivery etc... It also revealed that the payment options were limited and users didn’t know how to pay. Moreover, the checkout page endlessly loaded, and the users closed it in a few seconds. As a result, these issues led to a higher shopping cart abandonment rate on the site.

User Personas

We consolidated the user needs and pain points with an affinity map and came up with user personas. We then decided to design for the three most frequent personas, as the other personas are more tech-savvy and will definitely be able to use the eShop.

UX Recommendations

As a result of the Strategy, Research, and Analysis phase, we were able to come up with the following suggestions that fueled the true revamp of our eShop.

Simplification of product listing page
Simplification of number selection page
Simplification of the checkout page
Optimization of plan offerings
Inclusion of key benefits and roaming in plan packages
Card-based design approach for better understanding
Progressive disclosure to reduce cognitive stress
Optimization of user inputs to a bare minimum
Application of UX laws (Fitt’s, Hick’s laws and more…)

Customer Journey Map

Creating a customer journey map helped us to visualize how customers feel at all brand touchpoints so that we could avoid potential issues ahead of time, increase customer retention, and discover key information to make the best decisions for our business. It helped address questions like:

What are the customer touchpoints?
What’s customer engagement?
Is our app interface user-friendly and matching customer expectations?
Why is the user navigating away from the app so quickly?
How often is our customer reaching out to customer service and is the team able to address the issues in a timely manner?
How is the customer interacting with our brand before they decide to make a purchase? How are they feeling at this stage?

Information hierarchy

We wanted to make a something like a blueprint or a visual representation of the product’s infrastructure and hierarchy.

Process

Take inputs from the User personas and User journey maps.
Conducted card sorting within the team.
Conducted guerilla testing with some outsiders.
Iterated to narrow down on the best hierarchy or presentation of information.
Documented and circulated the sitemap.

Wireframes and sketches

We started with hand sketches to offload some of the ideas. We used Crazy eights sketching as a part of diverging ideas. This was a great way to force ourselves out of one variant and explore other crazy ideas. Evaluation is was the iterative process here. We validated the wireframes in terms of user flow and experience and identify areas where improvements were needed.

Process

Take inputs from the user personas and user journey maps.
Conducted daily brainstorming within the team to define the journeys per module.
Sketched out the ideas (Diverge).
Regrouped midday to assess the ideas (Converge).
Documented and circulated for approval.

Design

We brought the prototype to a colored high fidelity prototype adhering to the group’s branding guidelines. Improved Bill Payment design by introducing the saved card feature. Added clear rewards and gamification to boost engagement