C1 - Internal use

Challenge

In my organization, we had partnered with a retailer to implement our new technology in their  Ecommerce applications (iOS & Android). The purpose of the tool is two-fold:

1) The tool is supposed to draw in new users to our category, as it’s employs a novelty and

enhanced user experience

2) Drive conversion rates higher, because if consumers are able to use the tool, it should reduce

the barriers to decide to buy online

My challenge here is that despite successfully driving conversion rates higher (50-100% increase) across  four other partners, our conversion rate was actually negatively impacted in this partner, the first time  we have seen this occurrence. Given that this was negatively impacting for this standalone  implementation, we set out to understand what is wrong and how we can rectify the issue so that we  have a positive ROI when users engage with the tool.

Selection

The tool we utilized in this instance is Mind Mapping. Mind mapping helps to visualize the processes,  patterns and relationships that impact the problem, so we are better able to draw some main themes,  and help create a design criteria that addresses one or more of these themes.

Application

We wanted to understand all the factors that impacted the performance of the tool. We held a 2-hour  sessions with all the key stakeholders, and started putting post-it’s on the wall with all of the different  factors that can impact the outcome, whether they are positive/negative or unknown.

Once all the members had contributed what they had to say, we organized the post it’s in to 6 key  themes through a lengthy discussion, they were:

  Consumer Perception

  User Interface

  User Experience

  Tool Location in the app

  User profile

  Functionality

Insight

We immediately realized that we didn’t get any input from the consumer, and our items categorized  under “consumer perception” were purely assumptions… This is a limitation of mind mapping and  should have been addressed at some stage during the design thinking process.

Because we had many successful implementations, we were able to create comparisons between this  implementation and other implementations which worked. This helped to build a number of ideas,  mainly UI/UX. We would have to build some A/B testing & iterations with the retailer to be able to  actually understand whether these were the cause.

C1 - Internal use

Two of the sections (user profile & tool’s location in the app) could actually be investigated through data  analysis, so we see these as fast and achievable next steps to be able to investigate.

Approach

I believe this approach was the correct approach to help understand the challenge. In terms of other  approaches and more specifically tools at my disposal, a learning launch would be very complementary  in helping to test new hypotheses based on the finding of my mind mapping. For example, we could  change the design or the user experience in one or many Learning Launches and observe the outcome. If  all stakeholders agree that one of the learning launches yields the desired result, we can choose that our  ‘winner’ and ‘scale’ the idea by making this launch the sole product moving forward.

