How might we connect people who are looking for natural remedies for their ailments to products that can help them?

Product Description

Saje’s eCommerce experience is built on Salesforce Marketing Cloud (previously Demandware). The online experience contains category pages, product detail pages, education pages, and campaign landing pages.

Who are we designing for?

To date, there are two working personas:

  1. Someone who is committed to the ideal of “all natural” and is trying to positively impact themselves and the environment around them by switching to natural products.

  2. Someone who’s suffering from an ailment and is interested in finding natural products to support their recovery or symptom management.

Since we have two working personas, the information below are shared between the two.

Motivation

To feel better about what they put on their bodies and in their environment

GOALS

To find natural products that work and can provide long-term solutions

To efficiently find products and painlessly navigate the shopping experience in-store or online

Frustrations

They aren’t sure whether natural products will be as effective as their current, drugstore counterparts

Switching to natural products isn’t perceived as convenient or easy

How AM I CONTRIBUTING to solving the problem?

Although I work closely with an eCommerce Manager, an Analytics/Project Manager, and our development partners, I’m essentially a design team of one at Saje.

My primary responsibilities are comprised of gathering user insights and transforming those learnings into design improvement of Saje.com.

 

User Insights EXAMPLE: navigation tree test

Rather than conducting impromptu user interviews or formative usability tests then scrambling to find users when an improvement opportunity arises, I’ve systemized the process. When someone new is hired with the company, I book a 30 minute usability test and interview with them. During this meeting, I focus on two task sets:

  1. The first is to complete tasks associated to core workflows on Saje.com. I’ve created time benchmarks around each workflow by tracking their time to task completion. When one of these workflows are being worked on, I test the new design against these benchmarks. If the time to task is shortened, then the change is considered a positive improvement and goes into development.

  2. The second is to test a feature I’m working on at the moment.
    For example, during our first pass at improving the global navigation, I wanted to identify whether users had more trouble with the navigation or the category names. I asked the participants to “find Massage Oils” – first via a Tree Test, then via the navigation on the live site.

The test is imperfect, but revealed that the participants had trouble with both the category names and the live site navigation. Also, they had more uncertainty/apprehension with the live site navigation which led to a deeper dive in improving the visual design of the navigation.

 

CONTINUOUS IMPROVEMENT EXAMPLE: THE HOMEPAGE

The homepage remains the top landing page on Saje.com and a large percentage of traffic has the homepage as one of their visited pages. It has undergone three transformations since re-platforming in 2016 and continues to be a focus of improvement.

 

- First to second

The first change addressed the issues of underutilizing space. The user had to scroll a long way to find engaging content. In general, the second iteration of the homepage focused on ensuring that there were visual content hints above the fold and that content was displayed more horizontally than vertically.

First iteration of the homepage on Saje.com

Second iteration of the homepage on Saje.com

 

- Second to third

The change from the second to third iteration focused on scroll depth. The new horizontal “Feel Better” map was highly engaged, but the rest of the homepage was not. According to scroll depth maps from our Hotjar tests, we saw a ~40% drop-off of users after the Feel Better map.
Another major issue with the design was that it wasn’t scalable. The mixture of various creative assets with white backgrounds made the page feel disjointed. This was especially noticeable on mobile* which, at this point, made up more than 50% of our traffic.
The intent of the most updated change was to focus on users new to Saje – to speak to them about our product offering, show them how our products worked through product application videos, then navigate them to category pages.

*There was also a keen focus on the mobile homepage experience. which is a bit challenging to show in this format.

- THIRD TO FOURTH

Currently, we are looking at iterating the homepage again with two key focuses:

  1. To answer the core questions a new user has about Saje: “What does Saje do?”, “What are Essential Oils and why should I care?”, and “Where do I start?”

  2. To serve up two distinct experiences for new and returning users that personalize the content shown, so to better serve the differing intentions between the two user groups. This would lay the groundwork for further personalizations depending on shopping behaviour, personas, and other variables.

Role in team

Interaction Designer, Visual Designer (UI), User Interviewer and Usability Test Facilitator, Front-end Developer