Katie Chase
Summary
Problem
Customers often report friction and frustration in their browsing journey when they cannot find products which are relevant to them. They can lack inspiration and excitement when browsing, especially when seeing products which don’t match their personal style.
Furthermore, with increasing focus on optimising conversion during a tough trading landscape, ASOS wanted to explore opportunities for increasing net bag value through product recommendations, without distracting customers from their intended journey.
Solution
I contributed to the creation of the product recommendations strategy which included personas, guidance by journey stage and definition of opportunities. I presented this strategy to senior business stakeholders alongside a CX Product Manager and an AI Product Manager.
In addition to the strategy, I designed a 'quick win' solution to add product recommendations to a new point in the customer journey, the Saved Items page.
During discovery, we learnt customers have a high intention to buy when visiting this page. They often use it to shortlist products over time and return to compare products before purchasing. However, this means some are not exposed to relevant product recommendations which are shown on the Product Display Page.
I designed a modal experience which surfaces products from the popular People Also Bought (PAB) recommendations model after customers tap ‘Move to bag’ from Saved Items. This allows them to see personalised products which compliment the items they have added to their bag.
Result
The recommendations strategy is currently being used by various business teams as guidance for how to approach projects which involve recommendations. The Saved Items solution is currently in the iOS development backlog with the aim to be A/B tested very soon.
My role
I worked as the sole Product Designer on this project alongside a CX Product Manager and an AI Product Manager. My primary responsibilities were leading the customer research, planning and facilitating the stakeholder workshop and designing our weekly email comms.
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I collaborated with my Product Managers to define the overall strategy, guidance by journey stage and define personas and opportunity areas. My CX Product Manager carried out quantitative data analysis and competitor research and my AI Product Manager lead collaboration with Data Scientists.
Discover
For this project, my Product Managers and I had a turn around time of 6 weeks to complete all discovery work, build a strategy and start designing solutions for development.
To ensure we were aligned on deliverables we created a project plan which outlined deadlines for our key discovery activities, assigned owners and also plotted annual leave to make sure we had capacity to complete the expected work (this project happened during the bank holiday heavy month of May 2023).
My core responsibilities for discovery were leading the customer research, planning and facilitating the stakeholder workshop and designing our weekly email comms which we sent out to our stakeholders to keep them updated on the project. Below you can see examples of our weekly comms which shared highlights from our discovery activities.
To begin discovery, I ran 8 moderated customer interviews via UserTesting.com with the goals to learn when in the shopping journey participants wanted to see product recommendations, what type of recommendations they valued most and how their shopping mindset might impact their openness towards seeing recommendations. Some of the insight themes are listed below.
After learning about customers' needs and pain points relating to product recommendations, we held a remote workshop with 25 stakeholders from across the business with the goal to discuss what the future of product recommendations could look like at ASOS. I planned and facilitated the workshop. We focused the session around brainstorming ideas relating to 4 topic areas:
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What does the best product recommendations experience mean to you?
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How can we avoid customers being distracted by product recommendations?
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How can we use product recommendations as a source of inspiration?
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What do we need to consider to bring our product recommendations vision to life?
After the workshop, alongside my PMs, we affinity mapped the insights and summarised the ideas into 3 key areas for what the ideal recommendations experience could be:
Define
Based on the insights from our customers, stakeholders and quantitative data, we created the following mission statement for our product recommendations strategy.
Alongside this, we defined personas and guidance for how to approach recommendations by journey stage. As recommendations touch almost every part of the customer journey and in turn, many different Product Managers and stakeholders, the aim of this strategy toolkit is to set a standard for how teams should approach recommendations across the customer journey.
Once we had defined the strategy, we outlined various opportunities which aligned to solving our main customer problems.
Develop
After delivering the strategy work, we were then tasked with ideating ‘quick win’ solutions which would take little time to develop and help address the customer and business goals for this project.
I designed various solutions but for the purpose of this case study I will focus on one which addresses the opportunity to add recommendations to a new point in the customer journey, without causing distraction.
During discovery, we learnt customers have a high intention to buy when visiting the Saved Items page. They often use it to shortlist products over time and return to compare products around pay day before purchasing. I explored designs for a modal experience which used existing product recommendations components after customers added to bag from this page.
I ran unmoderated user testing to validate my designs and gain feedback on whether customers found this interaction disruptive, and to learn if they preferred a carousel design for the recommendations or a grid.
The results of the user testing were that participants preferred the carousel design as it was less intrusive than the grid. Other recommendations included adding an add to bag button on the product tiles to reduce the potential for distraction. Unfortunately, adding this feature was out of scope for the first A/B test due to limited tech team capacity.
Deliver
I prepared hand off documents in Figma which included scenarios for the different add to bag messaging within the experience. I also created a user flow to showcase how the model experience should function with different size selection experiences.
I worked closely with our iOS developers to ensure the development time for this feature was as short as possible (estimated 3-4 weeks due to using existing components). It is currently in the development backlog and will hopefully be built soon.
Learnings
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Ways of working: The weekly emails we sent to key stakeholders during this project was a great way of keeping them updated on our progress. It kept them excited about the project which resulted in positive engagement when we came to activities like running the workshop. I would repeat this style on comms in further projects, especially when they involve stakeholders from across the business and where buy-in is key. ​
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Adapting to changing scope: During this project I learnt the importance of being agile when the scope of deliverables changes. To begin, we were tasked with producing a product recommendations strategy and identifying wide reaching opportunities. However, we were then tasked with identifying 'quick win' solutions. Comprehensive research and good documentation allowed us to pivot our focus and adapt well to the change in brief.
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