Duration
6 months ( Pre & Post Release phase )
Role
Product lead for frontend shopping site and mobile application led a team of 4 designers and worked closely with the development team.
Conducted multiple iterations of user research, prototype user group studies, phone interviews, face to face interviews, stakeholders meetings and documented product development spec with the logic design of the project.
Tools used : Google analytics, Clevertap, hotjar, figma
Approach
Strategized this project basis existing consumer needs and stakeholder requirements, bringing together design thinking, product development and technology innovation, encapsulating customer’s pain points and as a result, developing best in the industry content driven shopping portal.
Also, conducted multiple phases of user research and implemented design methodologies addressing facets of key product success metrics, keeping product design innovations and solutions aligned with the evolving consumer needs.
About: MensXP Shopping
The idea behind MensXP Shop is to handpick brands that are unique, authentic, credible, and premium, while also being sustainable and ethical in terms of their production.
MensXP is used by over 15 million+ people in a month, users spread across the web, mobile and app showcasing content and videos with over 30 million+ page views, the biggest challenge for the new project were to not only encapsulate existing user’s needs for commerce project but also cave way for a new segment of the transactional audience.
Adding content-led commerce and shopping touch points to an existing product ecosystem & business model demands strategic planning for seamless integration into the existing platform. This requires multiple departments like supply chain, distribution, product & tech and customer support to work together to deliver a seamless experience to the end-user.
Moreover, the majority of problems are categorized under 4 buckets highlighted below, these posed challenges in product development, design and building new user experience.
MensXP is the most engaged men’s lifestyle publisher on social in India. Consisting of video IPs racking up millions of views. The product has built a loyal community of millennial and Gen Z users who are on the platform to provide authentic, inspiring and shareable content around fashion, beauty, fitness, health, and lifestyle.
However, moving into commerce and converting existing users into transacting shoppers was the hard part, and required earning the trust of the consumer.
Below, the video shows the structure of the mobile site before the launch of the shop that is focused on video & content without any bifurcation for commerce, lacking entry points for the shop, touchpoints inside article for products.
For publishers like MensXP, one of the biggest challenges was trying to influence people to purchase via content or video. Secondly, providing certain touch points in the customer journey in order to seamlessly facilitate the buying process and eventually drive behavioral change.
However, driving change in the customer behaviour would come from research into understanding consumer journey and how to influence user purchases.
Hence, providing a rich and informative experience with commerce and content blend with the need for informing the user first, and implementation of seamless product integration became critical.
Incorporating shopping related technology stack and payments architecture within the current ecosystem of content, videos.
Firstly, one of the key challenges was creating experiences for users based on behaviour and purchases, which would later be segmented into the new shopping design architecture.
Secondly, there were strategic and product-led challenges with implementing personalization solutions, due to lack of data and user group segments. Moreover, decoding solutions that would increase metrics like user retention, new purchases, cross-selling / up-selling recommendations are essential to increase adaptability with the new platform.
Before conducting user interviews, and curating data; we led workshop for questionnaire formation with all necessary stakeholders, for user recruitment in order to increase efficiency of user research.
The resulted in a comprehensive document which was detailed enough to capture all user problems & needs and bring forward their goals and pain points during the qualitative study.
Due to some initial beta releases of flight products like manbox, which was released before the full shopping site as a beta product; we were able to get some user feedback, collected over days and after examination of user affinity, loyalty, and engagement with the brand.
After analysing different sets of personas of possible buyers from existing users, we came up with 4 key user segments or personas for the shop launch of MensXP, two of which are highlighted below.
For users there were no touch points for entry into the shopping module, this demanded an complete overhaul of the existing navigation.
Post release, problems we encountered are highlighted below
- Low retention rate
- Low cart recalls; this came about analysing increasing abandon carts
- Users were not able to find there previous purchases easily; as they would have to land on MensXP and then navigate to previous order under Mensxp > Shop.
- Organic conversions were very low; due to lack of shopping or product push across the site.
In order to fix aforementioned issues, we implemented shopping touch points across the site, cart, user home page etc. Few of those initiatives are show below:
Please connect with me to get more insights and learnings gained from this project.
