Argos
Marketing, SEO, Content, Trade, CMS and Product team. The CMS Engineers, Senior UI Designer, Senior Product Manager, Lead Product Manager.
quarter
Senior UX Architect
During Black Friday period 2018 Argos made 296 million in revenue. I was tasked with redesigning the end to end Black Friday experience 2019 with a user-centric and clear architecture. This case study will focus on the design thinking around Black Friday page.
Black Friday period plays a great deal of importance for retailers. Argos make their most revenue in 3 days of Black Friday accounting for £296 million in revenue. The challenge with Argos was unique with stagnant performance over the last 6 years I was asked to lead the redesign of the Black Friday Experience.
I lead a structured workshop involving the Trading, SEO, Content management, CMS, Product and Design team. The workshop demonstrated the many cogs in the redesign from proposition definition too legal requirements and all the mechanics of Black Friday were covered in detail.Drawing business requirements: From the Trading workshop, we began to synthesis business requirements from 2018 and create a refined 2019 approach.
Previous years there was inconsistent messaging around product ranges, product cards and product bundles
Wider re-education around customer buying behaviour vs. Argos trading attitude/methods
Mobile experience was not optimised. Components being designed for desktop and loud and shouty
Tackling Black Friday with a holistic end to end journey approach which was very unclear before without consider different point
To establish where Argos required the most attention, I began to collected a mix of quant and qual research looking at performance, X and X from the last 2 years. This research discovery allowed me to identify areas of improvement, growth and optimisation. I highlighted where the Argos was losing value in the customer journey and demonstrated areas of opportunity.
Data Collection
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Research and data highlights
Visibility
Category Page
Badging
Search
Filter & Sort
Whilst redesigning the Black Friday experience, data played a key role in identifying behaviour on the current experience. I needed to apprehend the click through patterns in the experience lifecycle. Whilst collaborating closely with our Data Analyst I requested particular data points. My hypothesis was customers are more likely to convert in a Category Landing Page than a product on the Black Friday Landing Page. This proved to be validated as 11.65% shopped on Category Landing Page and converted in comparison to 8.54% of customers who shopped from a Black Friday page and converted.
The data also pointed out that, direct traffic from Black Friday page to a Category Landing Page is 5 to 7x higher than to Product Description Page. Which evidently displayed customers were looking with the aim to, browse or compare, hoping to see more options than 1 product.Surfacing up Categories than Products became the underlying direction for the information architecture of the Black Friday page.
Validating assumptions from 2018 Customer Behaviour
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From the workshop and wider discussions with the stakeholders the most obvious assumption was 'Argos customers would like to shop on Category Landing Pages rather than the Black Friday Page' which became the overriding focus in my approach when ideating
My approach to brainstorming and ideation was rapid wireframing which deemed most appropriate when collaborating closely with the CMS Product and Engineering team. This particularly involved discussing feasibility and complexities.
Too align with the Trading teams concerns around reducing the amount of product cards shown on the Black Friday page, I decided to start by designing at the two extremes opposites (Concept 1 and 4) followed by two further concepts leveraging a median between the two reducing the length of the page but also pushing the most interactable areas above the fold on mobile.
Stress testing extreme to minimum use of components
Design direction 1
Design direction 2
Design direction 3
Design direction 4
As the concepts developed Product and Engineering were privy to the design direction. I began to develop Concept 3 further ensuring the category CTAs were positioned at the top of the page in view when landing on mobile or app this fell perfectly aligned with the data. It indicated that we would be more likely to convert by showing Category CTAs by 5 to 7x. I ran product reviews with the trading team in attendance as we answered the Trading team’s concern around ensuring enough products were displayed, I leveraged the user journey as priority for the page demonstrating the Product Lister Page may require more thought outside the Black Friday Event Page.
Design direction and collaboration
I spent time interviewing participants with two prototypes with mixed components to observe customer behaviour but also look at the usability of these components in their context on mobile devices.
I found that consumers naturally want to browse in Category Landing Pages rather than on Black Friday page which gave our team further conviction in the design direction. However, this was only going to work if consumers saw CTAs rather than visual inventory cards. (Show the example)There was no particular preference around inventory cards displayed in 2 columns or 1 column. However, I did observe 1 column proved to more readable especially as customers scrolled faster in this view.
Script
Download pdf presentation
Playback to Product and Eng
The most significant impact in click rate was seen on the newly built M15 component. This landed customers directly into Category Landing Pages and saw the most clicks across web, mobile and apps.
We saw the greatest click rate on the new Filter component, known as the Kitkat
Integral for cross functioning teams to understand rationale behind all the decisions made. UX decision were mapped against user pain-points to ensure each frustration was addressed. As there was overwhelmingly small nuances with the redesign along with larger elements it was important to document it in an end to end format. This assisted teams to visually digest the decisions and evidence (eg, data) instantly in a single place. Moving forward it formed the foundation of shareholder report back.
Design decision log
Mobile First: Our mobile first strategy demonstrated a clear win, as 75% of visits to the event page on Black Friday itself came via a mobile or tablet device vs. 61% last year.
Revenue: Black Friday saw conversion grow a significant +0.9% YOY from 6.41% to 6.46% this year. The Black Friday Event revenue hit £348million, an addition of £55million in comparison the the year before or 15.9% YOY.
Order Value: The order value of customers per order increased by 9.6% from last year resulting to £8.24 per order.