Underground Printing

UX Research & Design
Project Overview
Underground Printing came to our team looking for suggestions to improve their customer flow throughout the entire shopping experience. Their wish for us is to audit of current checkout flow to suggest optimizations for a better customer experience. For the project outcome the client wants suggestions for design and interface improvements for each stage of the customer flow, from catalog to design to quote to checkout

Case Summary

Product Vision

A website that allows users/customers to seamlessly find, customize, and ultimately checkout with the perfect product selection. With a keen eye to improve this process on mobile devices to ensure the product will be viable in the future.

Discovered User Problem

The inability of users to select and customize the product to their preferred liking. This experience was very troublesome on mobile as some users found it nearly impossible to complete the task.

Outcomes

Improvement recommendations for the end-to-end customer experience presented to the client that showcases researched solutions based on UX methodologies. Though solutions could not be tested and iterated because of the nature of the project being student consulting.

The Process

The Team (Forthfive)

We are a team of UX Grad students at University of Michigan School of Information (UMSI). We worked, learned and communicated as a team throughout this process.

My Role

I served as project manager during the semester. My duties included:

  • Setting Meeting Dates
  • Managing Project Due Dates
  • Team Management
  • Client Communication

On top of my duties as a project manager, I like my team, researched, ideated and designed to meet our clients end goals.

The Steps

Gathering Insights

Interaction Map
1 Week
At the beginning of our task to understand our clients issue we developed a User Journey Interaction Map. We did this to understand the routes a user would take to get to through the journey and we had few key takeaways:
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  • Selecting Product is fairly straightforward (could use refinement)
  • Designing is challenging, requires design knowledge and patience
  • Checkout is simple and easy to complete
(View Full Map)
Interviews
2 Week
To better understand how to achieve these goals, the research team set out to conduct a series of five one-on-one interviews with potential users (determined by user’s need for a printing service, why they would need a design, and general online shopping tendencies).
Methods
  • One-on-one interviews
  • Creation of personas & scenarios
Findings
  • Provide detailed checkout information along with reliable delivery service
  • Develop a user-friendly customization platform suitable for diverse users including the need to reduce the two-step process
  • Need to consider the trust factor that links with the quality of product and service
Personas

Using the data collected from user interviews, we crafted three personas and corresponding scenarios. Through personas we made representations of target users of the Underground Printing’s online design and shopping experience to help illustrate to their team users’ needs, goals, behavior and pain points.

Surveys
2 Weeks
Underground Printing is looking to improve their overall shopping experience, which includes their design tool for customizing prints to their websites checkout process. Our team developed, iterated, distributed and ultimately analyzed the results of a survey which aimed at learning more about how users use said design tools and their general bulk shopping behavior. With the intention of using this data to inform design improvements.

Recommendations

  • Provide import features for more advanced users
  • Have some kind of “quick design” feature that allows the user to design a shirt in several simple steps
  • More usability tests should be conducted, the detailed functionality should be closely looked at and improved
  • Provide help and customer service in the design process

Evaluations

Comparative Evaluation
1 Week
In this study, we took a look at different competitors of Underground Printing to analyze multiple aspects of their respective product and to attain crucial insights which can help build a good UX. They include direct, indirect, partial, parallel, and analogous competitors from large websites like RushOrderTrees to a local printing company.

Based on our previous interview results and the features of the competitors, we formulate criteria matrix to look at our competitors more closely:

Findings

Interaction Patterns (RushOrderTees, Uberprints, 4imprint, Nike, Zazzle)
  • Shorter process on the competitor websites
  • Less sign-up requirements on competitors products
Design Tools
  • Snap feature (Uberprints, CustomInk)
  • Larger design buttons (Uberprints, Custom Ink & Nike)
  • More design tool options (RushOrderTees)
  • Better upload platform (RushOrderTees)
  • Quick design (Custom Ink, Zazzle)
  • Product preview (RushOrderTees, Custom Ink, Uberprints, 4imprint, Nike)
Checkout Process
  • Loading page notification (Custom Ink, Uberprints, Nike)
  • Get a quote improvements (4imprint, RushOrderTees)
  • Cart structure/comments (Uberprints)
Overall Content
  • Design name conventions (Custom Ink, Uberprints, Nike)
  • Reduce redundant information input (4imprint, RushOrderTees)
Heuristic Evaluation
1 Week
For the sake of the heuristic evaluation, we primarily defined our task as finding, designing, and customizing the product on their design platform, and checking out the product as a bulk purchase. We set out to assess some of the critical user interface elements along with evaluating the user experience of the entirety of the process defined. To perform this evaluation, we have employed theNielsen (1995) Heuristics Metric.

We compiled all heuristic results into one list and reviewed them as a group during the consolidation phase:
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Key Findings
  • Improve overall accessibility and freedom to navigate the website with ease (buttons such as “back”, “undo/redo” etc).
  • Incorporating page elements into a single element to eliminate redundant steps
  • Improving the design tool’s flexibility to accommodate experienced and inexperienced users
  • Provide better guidance through the processes (add loading bar)
Usability Tests
3 Week

In total, 6 usability tests were conducted and focused on the whole process of picking a product to designing said product and ultimately making a purchase. All five team members collaboratively analyzed both quantitative and qualitative data collected from said usability tests.

Our analysis was produced by aggregating all of our findings into one document where we as a group spent time on each note to determine the appropriateness, severity and actionability. We then tallied each note to see if they applied to multiple usability tests, thus providing more evidence

Results

Overall, we found that the design process to be the most problematic part of the experience for users. As we found anecdotally and when we aggregated our notes, the majority of users struggled most with designing. This was to be expected going in as our client and all of our previous research indicated that this part of the process was most problematic.

Findings
  1. Process is tedious and extraneous
  2. Broken upload feature and its options are misleading
  3. Design area is small and lacks dexterity
  4. Features and buttons are not salient
  5. Checkout information is inadequate
Recommendations
  1. Clearer product descriptions and elements
  2. Make sure all features are accessible, and detect colors in an uploaded image automatically
  3. Make design space fit the whole screen so the user can design on a larger space
  4. Establish a component library and rearrange the positions of important buttons and features
  5. Improve information that is displayed and its location throughout the process

Final Video & Recommendations

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