Esam is an online auction and shopping platform founded in 2007, where individuals and businesses can buy and sell various goods and services.
Redesigning the checkout flow was part of the product’s overall redesign. The product hadn't seen any designers for nearly 10 years. The company had a pretty traditional operation, without any improvements on the product experience during all those years.
I was the sole designer for this project, responsible for leading the design process. It wasn't a design-mature or design-led company, so I had to educate stakeholders on the product mindset and design processes. This helped us implement meaningful changes by setting the right strategy.
Due to budget constraints, we couldn't hire a researcher or conduct extensive user research. However, given the platform's significant user base, I used low-budget methods to gather insights and drive the redesign with a user-centric and effective approach. I believe this was a strange decision by the stakeholders for a platform with hundreds of thousands of active users.
Despite this, I did my best to include real users in our design process and set the right strategy. I used low-budget research methods to gather data, define problems, and validate ideas to develop a desirable final solution.
Our analytics data indicated that the cart abandonment rate on our platform was 68.8%. Various design errors were contributing to users abandoning their carts, resulting in lost revenue and dissatisfied users. The main issues included complex navigation, inconsistent visual design, and a lack of trust in the purchase quality.
My task was to lead the design process in the team.
I collaborated with the CEO and CMO as the main stakeholders to understand their concerns, gather data, and learn about the product and current workflows in the team.
I worked closely with the engineering team to ensure the proposed solutions were technically feasible and could be smoothly integrated into the existing system.
At first, I found it quite difficult to convince the stakeholders to conduct user research because there was a belief that they already knew the users and their problems.I built trust by educating the stakeholders on the design thinking approach and the importance of research in the process. I asked for a week to conduct research and share my findings.
I defined the new information architecture to organize and present information clearly, ensuring users could easily navigate the checkout process.
I created user journey maps to visualize and improve user interactions. I developed wireframes to outline the basic structure and elements of the product and built interactive prototypes to test and refine design ideas.
In my design process, I followed a structured approach consisting of five key stages: Discover, Define, Ideate, Design, and Test. In the Discover phase, I conducted thorough research to gather insights and understand user needs, behaviors, and pain points.
I observed analytics data and reviewed users’ comments on social media and their support request tickets for ethnography research. Additionally, I collaborated with customer support operators to conduct brief interviews with 15 users to understand their pain points and experiences in the checkout process.
I conducted multiple interviews with stakeholders to understand the feedback they’ve received from users. We also performed a competitor analysis to learn more about common checkout patterns.
By synthesizing and analyzing the gathered data, I identified patterns, themes, and insights about user needs, behaviors, and pain points to define problem statements for our user personas.
By identifying the main problems and clarifying the statements to frame the problem, we developed a series of How Might We (HMW) questions. These questions helped us explore potential solutions and guided our brainstorming sessions.
We prioritized the identified problems based on their potential impact and the effort required, resulting in a shortlist of key issues to address at this phase:
The primary goal was to design a simple, fast, and easy checkout process to increase the conversion rate.