WEB / MARKETING / INTERACTIVE GUIDE

Car Seat Fit Guide

Project Background

Joie Baby (an international baby gear brand) is currently going through a redesign of their direct-to-consumer website. Currently, there are a few different customer-facing websites and the goal is to combine all of them into one e-commerce site for multiple countries.

One of the websites to redo was the Car Seat Vehicle Fit Guide. This site allows customers to either validate that the Joie car seat they want will fit in their vehicle or help a customer find the best car seat for their vehicle.

My Role: UX Researcher & Designer

Goals

  • Evaluate steps in the current guide and reduce friction points.

  • Drive brand consistency by using the new design system.

  • Improve user trust through consistent experiences that work for everyone and allow users to complete the guide.

  • Increase traffic to product detail pages from 32% to 50%.

  • Increase guide completion rate from 67% to 80%.

Key Partners

  • Global Brand Director: Shannon Jacobson

  • Car Seat Product Manager: Sarah Harbold

  • Tech Lead: Amy Chen

  • Engineer: Samuel Lin

  • Project Manager: Grace Chien

  • Digital Analyst: Jonathan Moyer

Starting the project

Research

Current Experience Analysis

The first thing I did was go through the fit guide experience and experienced all of the different paths a user could come across. I documented a few key user flows and notated high priority issues as well as general UX and accessibility issues.

Afterwards, I went back through and highlighted some opportunities and ideas.

Mobile screenshots of the current experience

Partner collaboration and competitive analysis

Along with reviewing suggested competitor fit guides, the team informed me on how the current site came about, any thought processes that went into it and some frustrations they felt about the experience. I brainstormed with the Creative team to see what elements and media we could leverage from the new site design to bring into this new experience.

Our Digital Analyst gathered data around devices, exit points, questions that were skipped, completion rates and how many followed through to viewing a product to shop. I worked with our Engineering team to see if there were going to be any roadblocks based off of the initial flow issues and kept them along as I did each part of my process.

A few KPIs from the current experience:

  • 67% completion rate

  • 0.8% shared their results

  • 32% visited a product detail page after completion of the fit guide

User Testing

Usability Test: Current Experience

  • Unmoderated test with 6 users using User Brain

  • All participants were required to have a child who was 12 years or younger and lived in the UK (primary location for purchases of Joie gear)

The purpose was to discover the most helpful information for making purchase decisions and to find any large pain points and opportunities.

The test was made up of tasks, open-ended question and rating questions. I asked all participants to take the guide as if they had a child on the way.

Demographics / General Information

Feedback on choosing car seat type and installation method

  • When it came to choosing a type of car seat, most were confused why the Booster seat was displayed. (It clearly stated they were for 3-12 years old)

  • Most commented on the inconsistent information and added suggestions of showing weight and height recommendations.

  • 80% didn’t know what an ISOFIX installation method meant and males rated the importance of installation method way lower than the females did.

Feedback on the Car Seat results pages

  • Most wished there was more product information (like price, more images…etc)

  • During the test, I asked them them to choose 2 vehicles to find a car seat for and when viewing the results they had a hard time seeing which car they were viewing

  • 83% said they would share the results (which was drastically different from what we saw in our real data)

Information Architecture

Documentation

  • Documented the number of “happy path” steps and worked with the Brand Director and Product Manager to cut them down by 50%

  • Determined all “failure points” (ie: if there was no match for their vehicle or their vehicle wasn’t listed) and added suggestions for how we could still move the customer forward.

Design & Testing

Wireframing

I sketched out a couple of basic frames on paper and then jumped into Figma to start skinning the experience using the Joie Design System.

UI Design

Joie’s Design System was used to create most of the experience.

Usability Test

After creating the core screens, I launched another user test for the new experience. I kept some of the same questions and added others due to the structure changes.

The same demographics were used, 2 males and 4 females who were expecting or current parents and lived in the UK.

Results

What I originally thought would be an easy addition was the product cards on the results page

  • In a normal e-commerce experience, a customer is used to seeing a wall of products and understands that they need to click on the style name or the image to learn more and shop the product.

  • What I didn’t expect was that in this fit guide experience, users wouldn’t know how to purchase a car seat (at least 50% commented on it)

Adding additional media and descriptions up front allowed customers to feel confident in their answers throughout the process.

MVP Launch and Results

We’ll find out in 2023

  • This fit guide along with the rest of the website redesign will be going live in early 2023. Once some time has passed, I’ll be updating this case study with user data.

“During her time with us, Yoko acted as an advocate for UX within the business; patiently educating all of our teams on the importance and broad reach of UX, and carving out a niche for that function within the business where nothing existed before.”

Shannon Jacobson
Global Brand Director, Joie International