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E-commerce shopper interviews
Challenge
- ADT’s new eCommerce store, which offered B2C solutions for residential and smart home security, suffered from low conversion rate and high rates of cart abandonment.
- These struggles were in spite of superior brand recognition and an unrivaled legacy in the industry (ADT was founded in 1874).
- Having never spoken to its users, ADT’s UX research team defined a primary exploratory research program of user interviews with recent ecommerce shoppers and cart abandoners.
Strategic purpose
Improve conversion and reduce cart abandonment in eCommerce
Research question
What are customers’ needs when it comes to purchasing home security products and services online? How can those needs inform the solutions we choose to design, test, and build?
Approach
- I directed a recurring program of remote user interviews with recent online purchasers (new ADT customers), recent phone purchasers who had abandoned ecommerce, and cart abandoners.
- My responsibilities included research design, recruitment and participant compensation, conducting the interviews, notetaking, analysis, and socialization/reporting.
- I socialized insights continuously with cross-functional teams, impacting tactical and strategic decision-making in real time.
Process
The team
The plan
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As a recurring program, the timeline was flexible. Timely reporting of insights, however, was essential for collaboration to impact product development.
A framework for collaboration
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Continuous and timely socialization of insights supported both tactical and strategic decision-making by key stakeholders, including cross-functional teams and business leaders. In this way, we optimized the site while also planting the seeds for new product development.
An anecdote about tactical impact
One interview revealed a major issue - related to competing promotions from different sales channels - that was leading to lost ecommerce sales. Due to content and navigation-related confusion, some intending ecommerce shoppers were mistakenly driven to phone sales. I reported this issue to the design and product teams immediately via Slack, and shared detailed findings in a presentation deck.
The outcome was both immediate and permanent. In the short term, the confusion was resolved, with minimal impact to ecommerce sales. Longer term, these findings raised awareness of an issue that can now be thoughtfully avoided by design.
Impact
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Deliverables
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Flash report
Key insights: presentation deck (sample slides)
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Detailed insights: reading deck (sample slides)
User personas and journey maps
Reflections
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I enjoyed working in a space where there were many unknowns. That fuzzy space offered the opportunity for discovery of exciting insights to guide product development and user-centered design. At the same time, too much fuzzy space can make it harder to connect insights with opportunities. I learned the importance of grounding even open-ended discovery research in a clear-eyed understanding of business priorities.
In the future I’d be keen to facilitate recurring workshops, ideally in a virtual whiteboard like Miro that also serves to document the experience. In this way, I’d aim to increase stakeholder investment and direction to shape research questions.