Founded in 1947, H&M Group is a global design company with \~4,702 stores in 76 markets and 56 online markets.
H&M Group believes in making great design available to everyone. The family of brands and business ventures offers customers around the world a wealth of fashion, beauty, accessories and homeware, as well as modern menus with fresh and local produce at some of the brands’ in-store eateries.
Project overview
Role: User researcher & strategist, product design support.
Methods: In-depth qualitative interviews, customer journey mapping, brainstorming, information architecture, service blueprint, usability test, heuristic analysis.
Skills: Interviewing, synthesizing, facilitating, design critique, mental model mapping.
Deliverables: Customer journey map, personas, research summaries, prototypes, design system.
Vision
H&M's vision is to connect its brands on a personal level, encouraging their customers to explore their own style
Discovery phase
Our team worked with all six H&M brands — Cos, Arket, & Stories, Weekday and Monki —. Our goal was to discover unmet user needs and design an MVP solution that would work across all business segments.
As a first step, we performed a discovery phase, during which we identified the problem space, framed the problem(s), and gathered sufficient evidence and guidance to proceed.
Understanding our users: Once we have identified the problem, we need to understand how it affects them, their needs, wants, and values.
The problem space: Determine how and why the issue arises and how it impacts users and the organization.
Shared vision: Talk with stakeholders about business objectives and desired outcomes, and answer questions such as ‘What are we hoping to accomplish?’ or ‘What does success look like?’
The problem space
To offer a customized experience, we need to gather enough data about our customers to understand their motivations, preferences, and behaviors.
In the first place, there was a low percentage of logged-in users. Also, we found a low percentage of returning users.
What we found was a centralized vision of both business vision and business that clash with a multinational company with presence in more than thirty countries.
Hypothesis
Brand authority is fairly low for all brands except H&M. Users are unwilling to create an account because they aren’t sure if they will return. Aside from that, the value propositions for most of the brands are unclear, and the technical debt makes it impossible for new solutions to be iterated over in the future.
Ideation
As a first step of the plan, we launched for all brands the “Favourites” feature. A scalable and easy-to-use solutions that will delight our users. The goal of this MVP was to start offering our customers valuable features that encourage them to return to the site and to create an account.
- The “Favourites” features offers:
A tool that allows users to remember and easily access items of interest with low effort. - Less commitment than shopping bags.
- Easy to use (users expects. complementary features that allows them to remember and access products of interents)
Alongside the feature we launched marketing journeys that complement the experience.
Once we finished the implementation of the “Favourites” accross all brands, we built the “Notify me back”, a subtle visual or verbal suggestions to help users recall specific information, influencing how they respond.
Customer journey
We met with each team to discuss the process a customer would go through from beginning to end, as well as what their departments did along the way.
Using these findings, I compiled detailed research summaries that highlighted trends and patterns.
Wireframes
Wireframes serve a variety of functions:
- Show pathways between pages to connect the site’s information architecture to its visual design
- Consistently display particular types of information on the user interface
- Determine the interface’s intended functionality
- Determine how much space to allocate to a given item and where that item should be located in order to prioritize content
Information architecture
The goal was to organize, structure, and label content in a sustainable and effective way to help users find information and accomplish tasks. To accomplish this, we needed to understand how all the pieces work together within the system and how they relate to each other.
For the creation of systems of information, I analyzed the interdependant nature of users (audiences, tasks, information-seeking behavior, experience), content (objectives, data types, volume, governance) and context (business goals, culture, technology, constraints).
Evaluative research
Usability tests
Using representative users we seek to identify usability issues, collect qualitative and quantitative data, and assess participants’ satisfaction overall.
Quantitative data
- Success rates
- Task time
- Error rates
- Satisfaction questionnaire ratings
Qualitative data
- Observations about pathways participants took
- Problems experienced
- Comments/recommendations
- Answers to open-ended questions
Takeaways
- Shopping car used as a holding area to avoid registration.
- Save for later it’s a different function than favourites, and it’s used during th checkout.
- Users use favourites as a comparison table, a reference, a scrapbook for ideas.
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