UX Research to Design Omnichannel Customer Experience

Customer

The Customer is a large corporation running a number of businesses including omnichannel retailing represented by several brick-and-mortar stores and Magento e-shops, hotels, restaurants, a sports facility and an online magazine.

Challenge

To stay one step ahead in the competitive environment, the Customer strived to realize an ambitious idea of creating an integrated customer base and earning customer loyalty with a personalized approach.

As the first stage of this large-scale project, the Customer was planning to improve an online store and a hotel’s website, both based on Magento. To create great user experience, they needed to get to know their customers better. The analysis of the customer bases was required to reveal customer needs: what can prevent customers from a purchase and what can trigger them to make it.

The Customer expected that shopping behavior analysis would improve their ecommerce solutions giving them a competitive advantage.

Solution

With vast experience in Magento development, ScienceSoft’s team started the project with advanced UX research to lay the groundwork for further improvement of the websites.

The UX research included two stages:

• Creating personas

• Each customer has different shopping behavior, goals and fears. ScienceSoft used the customer data to identify common features of key customer segments and create customer types referred to as personas.

All the aspects analyzed and described for each persona formed four large groups:

• Background
• Use of modern technologies
• Buying preferences
• Shopping behavior

At this stage, around 15 personas were created. It helped to develop a comprehensive vision of current customers. Instead of working with each customer separately or with the impersonalized customer pool, ScienceSoft offered to target customer types specified by similar features and shopping behavior.

• Creating user stories

The creation of personas translated into the development of 30+ user stories. ScienceSoft’s UX designers simulated all possible behavioral scenarios for each persona, determined the issues they can stumble upon while navigating the websites and identified business leaks. The team offered improvements to achieve the best customer experience.

At the stage of UX design, ScienceSoft came up with prototypes of web pages created with due regard to revealed preferences and needs of customer segments, proposed recommendations how to make ecommerce solutions simpler to navigate and more attractive for customers.

Results

Consistent with the initial task, ScienceSoft conducted a UX research of customer bases and offered a custom UX design for two Magento websites. The developed prototypes of web pages were used for improving the websites. This cooperation has become a starting point in a large-scale project of cross-business integration.

Technologies and Tools

Uxpressia Service Design Tool