Influenced by Stanford D School’s Design process- I added an additional testing phase for mid-fidelity prototypes to confirm the redesign’s usability. This decision was made at the time in order to receive customer feedback and confirm the high-fidelity prototype's usability for the Pawz N'Style's client.
Pawz N'Style mentioned that potential customers always called in with the same questions. Some customers left the phone conversation frustrated due to difference in information expectations.
In addition to updating the FAQ information on the website, I also wanted to understand the potential customer's point of view. Specifically, what motivated and influenced customers during their decision making process, and what could potentially help increase their positive impression of Pawz N'Style.
After the kickoff meeting, I began conducting research with the following questions in mind:
Looking deep into the dog grooming industry and situation, I compiled my research and presented my findings at our client meeting. The secondary research was a combination of survey data, yearly statistics reports, and referencing from competitive websites.
The client was pleasantly surprised to learn new facts about the industry market and 2021 trends, and gained valuable, applicable knowledge on customer criteria in Canadian dog grooming salons.
Samples of numerical data presented:
The analysis below is focused on website feature evaluation. I focused on grooming spas that the client considered as her main competitors, and other popular grooming spas within close proximity, that could potentially be her competitors as well.
Key Takeaways
I created two provisional personas (Potential and Current customers) based on the statistics and data gathered from secondary research so far. This helped me form a basic guideline for the individuals I wanted to recruit and interview; I also added their goals and frustrations to observe and confirm in user research.
Based on the project timeline, I realized that I had to focus on one specific persona. Because acquiring new customers and handling the current overflow of customer inquiries was more important to the client, I prioritized the New Pawrent user.
I recruited a total of 9 participants- 4 potential customers and 3 current customers of Pawz N'Style. All sessions were moderated, virtual interviews conducted over Zoom.I recruited current customers as well, to better understand the whole grooming process and their thoughts on the current systems. It provided rich information that I would not have known otherwise if I focused only on the target group.
I organized the information on digital post it notes and synthesized the data via affinity diagram. This helped me capture common trends among the customers. Based off the patterns, I also created empathy maps to further understand their points of view. It was interesting to see common motivations and behaviour points converged together.
Key Findings of Potential customer's needs include:
“I don’t feel comfortable calling in if I’m not ready to book”
New Pawrent users needed a way to connect with Pawz N'Style in a safe, comfortable way, where they could obtain information within an expected period of time without the pressure to commit immediately. This was a need that had to be met in order to fairly consider whether Pawz N’Style was right for them.
Maddy is the New Pawrent Millennial, based on potential customers interviewed. All design decisions moving forward were made with consideration of New Pawrents, like Maddy.
Pawz N'Style's initial challenge was the high number of customer inquiries and the lack of sufficient information online. This tells us that one group of potential customers are comfortable with calling.
During the research phase, we learned that there was also a group of potential customers who are not comfortable with calling. However, both groups have the same goal and struggle of obtaining important information about Pawz N'Style to make their decision.
I realized that by solving this same problem for both groups, Pawz N'Style's challenge would also be solved.
With that in mind, I started from the POV:
Pawz N'Style: How might we answer all the customers' inquiries while still giving Pawz N'Style more time to groom?
Maddy: How might we provide Maddy with all their specific answers, without the need to call in early on?
To these 3 main problems:
For each problem, I wrote them on top of the page and jotted down any ideas that were generated during this timed session. This divergent thinking exercise helped me think of potential solutions within a short period of time.
I created a Venn diagram to get a visual comparison of the client and user's goals and challenges. This helped reinforce my understanding of what to prioritize and address.
The Common goals matched the HMW questions to be addressed. This indicated that I was moving in the right direction.
While maintaining the original structure of the website, I modified the new sitemap to include more details based on what the Users wanted to know, and the common practices from competitor websites.
Based on the HMW and main goals, I created 4 tasks to understand how users like Maddy would behave. (Learning the positive quality traits, Communication style motivation, obtaining information behaviour and thoughts).
To ensure that I covered and considered all the main scenarios and routes that Maddy would take, I created User flows for each task.
The client was interested in knowing what potential customers would think of the design updates we made. First, mid-fidelity wireframes were tested on 4 participants. After some changes, the high fidelity prototype was tested on 5 new participants. Both rounds were conducted using remote moderated testing.
Following the tests, major changes were made to the website design. I'll be explaining primarily about the changes made to the high fidelity prototype.
1. The News banner was not apparent and this section was easily missed. To capture their interest on the message, I added a playful design.
2. The timeline was an interesting feature, but majority preferred to search for the same information on the Services page. To prevent redundancy, it was removed and combined and under the services section on the Services page.
1. Initially, the contact information was placed after services. This was intentional for convenient access. However, similar details were usually located at the bottom and users assumed the webpage ended there. Following Jakob's law, the banner was relocated to the bottom, above the footer on every page.
2. Users were happy to see a Price Reference Chart. Excited, many skipped over important details which were needed to calculate the overall estimate. To counter this and to increase transparency, the important details became more prominent and a sample shoulder-height calculation was included.
3. For a better overview, 'Factors affecting price and groom time' was moved up.
1. For a quick overview of what to expect, a banner description was added on each page. One of the main concerns was the Dog Groomer's response time, so this was clarified here.
2. The term "Booking Request Form" was confusing and gave the impression that users could only book with the form, and not request for the price estimate. To clarify its meaning, a reassurance message for price estimate was added.
Below are the 6 main pages created for this project. The functional prototype is the product of the research, design, and testing mentioned up to this point.
I enjoyed working on this redesign project with the client. Anchalee was happy with the new website design and requested for me to continue working with her. The next steps is for the website to be developed and published online.
Some of the main design deliverables that helped influence and shape the solution included:
- Creating Maddy, the Persona- this helped me with user empathy, I could also discover valuable insight which Anchalee was unaware of (expectations and hesitations).
- Goals Venn Diagram- this deliverable helped me confirm that I was serving business and user needs in the right direction, aligning the main goals addressed.
- Involving users in the Usability test- this helped to surface and address some key basic issues before building the whole website and launching it to the customers.
One thing that I’d do differently...
I found the extra usability testing step valuable for Anchalee to see the potential outcome. However, in order to save resources in the future (time, users, pushing the project forward), I would stick to testing once during the mid-fidelity prototype stage, and then allocate resources more efficiently by conducting a post launch usability test instead.
.png){kind=icon}
