Innovam — Streamlining the checkout experience

Innovam supplies training programmes for the automotive, bicycle and maritime industries. The courses can be reserved and purchased on their website.

The brief

Innovam asked me to evaluate their e-commerce checkout experience, deliver a report that would point out its various weaknesses and design a solution. The objective of the evaluation was to increase the site’s revenue. Furthermore, Innovam indicated having a long-range planning of improvements and innovations.

Approach

I conducted on-site interviews (qualitative usability tests) with Innovam's customers to understand the complete sum of experiences that customers go through when interacting with the website.

These ethnographic insights gave a broad understanding of the way Innovam's website and products where used in the context of everyday school and work-life and helped to address gaps in the entire customer experience.

Ethnographic methods contribute to a deep understanding of the customer, processes, goals and context(s) of use, enabling innovation to become meaningful and valuable.

Looking for behaviour patterns, I categorised the customers I interviewed who expressed similar anxieties, attitudes, motivations, situations and used these to create four archetypes, 'user personas'.

To design the most pleasing experience towards and during the checkout process, I wrote checkout scenarios featuring these user personas. The personas were used as a tool to help foster empathy, to show what content the website must have and how it should be organised.

Ethnographic Research; an unfiltered view of reality

Some findings: a majority of the smaller repair shop owners reordered the same courses sporadically, not aware of other useful product offerings and branch performance support. Often forgotten their passwords for the online environment and were struggling to reset them.

Larger companies and schools who frequently ordered more substantial sums of courses for several people at once, often found workarounds for their large orders, emailed their request or called. This particular group helped with the solution for all forms and the first step in the shopping cart checkout.

Other issues included UI aspects that were unclear to the users and forced them to spend unnecessary time searching the site. The research findings showed problems with navigation, content hierarchy, (unnecessarily)long forms, page layout and error handling

I documented specific problem areas, proposed suitable solutions for them and suggested priorities for implementing the solutions. The design proposal however, was zoomed into the registration, login and checkout process.

Services

Interaction design
Prototyping
UX research

Date

2017

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