Rue Gilt Groupe has more than 20 million members across their two retail brands, Rue La La and Gilt. But they were struggling to convert their newest members, especially on mobile web. The Product team had plenty of assumptions as to why this might be the case. And they had plenty of ideas for enhancements to the user experience large and small. But where was the best place to start? With resources stretched tight, were there smaller wins that could have a significant impact?
It had been a while since the team had run user tests on mobile web, and they had never tried remote unmoderated testing. So that’s where I began. I ran a series of tests using Validately’s user panel to mimic a typical first time user experience, prove or disprove some of the team’s assumptions, and help to pinpoint usability issues that might hinder first-time shoppers.
Product List Page before (left) and after (right). My design updates focused mainly on wayfinding and navigation improvements..
We learned a lot from those initial tests, but one of the things that stood out was that new members struggled just to find their way around the site. I was able to identify and design a number of improvements to wayfinding and navigation, and worked with the team to implement them within a short time. With subsequent user tests, pre-post analysis and AB testing, the team was able to see the changes had a positive impact not just on new members, but existing members as well.
The Women’s Section before (left) and after (right). My design updates focused mainly on wayfinding and navigation improvements..
But there were other issues that couldn’t be solved with a simple UI update. New and existing members alike had trouble finding the products they wanted. Many of these issues were compounded by data quality problems. Next the team decided to look inward at some of our internal tools for managing product data. Working with our design co-op, I helped to design and implement a new tool for making more accurate category assignments, which was adopted into the workflow, and resulted in a vastly improved browsing experience for members.
Internal tool for product category assignment to improve data quality.
Browsing Women’s Clothing by category before (left) and after (right) the introduction of our internal tool for assigning categories to products.
Looking forward, I proposed new ways of thinking about our product data. I helped the team visualize how that might be managed internally, and how it could be represented in the customer-facing ui.
Diagrams documenting the current internal workflow, and proposing how it could be modified with the goal of improving data quality.
Low fidelity concepts demonstrating how new data models could translate into an improved browsing experience for users.
