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Cause-Cart
Cause-Cart is a curated online marketplace for products that have positive social and environmental impact.
Identify
Business Need
Cause-Cart is a unique e-commerce platform that prioritizes purpose over profit. The website serves as a hub for consumers seeking to shop mindfully and learn about new causes. It hosts third-party vendors with a strict curation process to ensure all products align with its mission.
The owner of Cause-Cart sought guidance to improve key usability aspects of the ecommerce platform. The goal? Drive customer satisfaction and business growth by optimizing the user experience.
Primary Audience
Cause-Cart’s primary users want to not only enjoy their purchases but also know that the dollars they spend are making a positive impact.
Cause-Cart’s key demographic is ethically-minded Millennial and GenX online shoppers. These busy individuals, often parents with disposable income, prioritize future generations in their online shopping choices. They are crucial to Cause-Cart’s early growth.
Secondary Audience
Cause-Cart’s long-term growth strategy targets Gen Z online shoppers, who value sustainability and ethics. Shaped by the financial crisis and climate change, they seek transparency and ethical practices in their brand choices. Despite only 38% of them being in the US workforce, they are pivotal for Cause-Cart’s longevity.
Skills
- heuristic design evaluation
- usability study planning
- remote and in-person usability studies with think-aloud protocol
- research data synthesis thru affinity mapping
- compilation of insights and opportunities
- design and interactive prototyping
- home page
- product selection flow
- checkout flow
Tools
- Google Sheets heuristic evaluation
- Google Docs usability study script
- Figma & FigJam
- Chrome developer tools for in-browser code changes
Research and Synthesis
Using Jakob Nielsen's 10 Usability Heuristics as the pre-defined success criteria to guide evaluation, I uncovered 33 opportunities, 11 of which were critical or major. Following this evaluation, both in-person and remote usability tests were planned and facilitated to identify additional opportunities for refinement.
Research findings were consolidated to reveal these key insights:
Brand identity is obscured.
Causes are hidden in an unnintuitively-named Subcategories section and have no content.
Slow site performance and omissions in content are suspect and undermine trust.
Premature log in requirements are creating a barrier to shopping.
Solution Design
Unobscure Brand Identity
Keep only those social media icons representing media platforms on which Cause-Cart is actively curating content. Link directly to branded pages rather than generic URLs.
Maintain a legible logo regardless of screen size. At browser widths of 993 pixels and narrower, the logo was only 48 pixels wide.
Add an alt tag to the logo to improve accessibility.
Before:
After:
Improve visibility of home page illustrations and the words "Buy for a Cause".
When readable, these elements have proven to help users understand Cause-Cart's purpose.
These elements obscured one-another due to overlap of the text and images at most browser widths.
Before:
After:
Clarity and Confidence
Content omissions, dysfunctional features, and slow performance are obstacles to user trust.
Add a cart icon in the upper right corner so users have a clear path to checkout.
Reduce shopping deterrents by removing any non-critical sign in requirements.
Currently, the sort by label remains “Price: Higher to Lower” regardless of selection. This should update each time a user changes the sort.
Darkening of the drop menu's hover state is recommended for improved visibility of system status.
Before:
After:
Broken features like these sort labels reduce user confidence and trust.
Display an estimated number of shipping days based on the entered zip code.
Customers need to know when to expect arrival, especially for handmade goods.
Provide an address when pickup is offered. This option is only meaningful to customers if they know when and where they would be required to travel.
Before:
After:
The presence of expected details helps to reduce the likelihood of cart abandonment.
Emphasize Causes
Users have trouble finding products by cause because there are too many (81) options and most are unrepresented with products.
Before:
Most cause-based product searches yielded 0 results, a critical issue considering the site's intent.
After:
Tagging indicate which causes apply to products.
Relevant filters are available when products from multiple categories are visible.
An overwhelming 81 causes were reduced to 38.
Only those causes for which products are available display.
Capitalization has been standardized for consistency.
Causes have been consolidated and grouped. Users can expand or collapse the new filtering views.
Propose and Reflect
I collected high-level details into an Insights & Opportunities Report for the client.
Next Steps
Perform a card sorting exercise with the proposed condensed list of causes, involving both shoppers and vendors, to ensure that the labels and groupings are intuitive.
Collaboratively organize and re-evaluate raw data for opportunity analysis and quantitative statistics.
Explore the potential for improved site performance. Uncover and resolve the source(s). Suspected contributors are:
missing alt tags
large file sizes
non-descriptive file names
no Content Delivery Network (CDN) for caching files
poor server performance due to location and/or web host quality
Determine the rate of abandonment due to site delays. If abandonment rates don't rise after initial fixes, continue improvements.
What I Learned
Heuristic evaluation provides early identification of usability issues which can improve the quality of usability testing.
These factors add complexity to analysis:
Test iteration.
Excessive requests for ratings can lead users to a state of rating fatigue.
Data analysis is more efficient when collaborators align in advance on participant labeling.
The capture of granular, low-priority details slows data consolidation.
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