URBN Marketplace Return Improvements – Solo Project – 6 Months

USER RESEARCH / COMPETETIVE ANALYSIS / WIREFRAMING & PROTOTYPING / A/B TESTING / USABILITY TESTING / DEV Q&A

User Research & Experience Design @ URBN

Worked for URBN's product team to research and re-design the return process for the Marketplace (non-URBN brand: Adidas, Nike, etc.) items.

I took the process from the discovery stage to the design and then the development Q/A stage, doing both research & design.

PROJECT INFO

Worked as a UX Research & Design Co-op.
Worked with Research and the Customer Retention team for the Marketplace Project.
April 2023 to September 2023

ROLES AND RESPONSIBILITIES

UX Researcher: Finding friction points, competitive analysis, and secondary research
UX Designer: Design explorations, usability testing, A/B testing, and dev +Visual Q/A

TOOLS USED

UserTesting.com
Figma
Google Analytics
Confluence
Jira

☄️ Impact of my work

*Estimated Impact. Waiting on updated data from the company.

🧥 Context and Background for URBN

URBN is a multinational fast-fashion company headquartered in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. URBN is the parent company that holds the rights to Urban Outfitters, Free People, Anthropologie, and Nuuly. The Marketplace on URBN gives a platform to non-URBN brands (Nike, Adidas, Puma, etc.) and other local artisans to sell their products on URBN's platform. During my time at URBN, I was assigned to work on the problems related to the Marketplace return process.

UNDERSTANDING THE PROBLEM

🤔 What do we already know?

🔧Why fixing this is important?

🚚Being able to return an item easily is crucial

🔍 Let's learn more about our problem

Core Research Question

What are the friction points in the user journey when returning a Marketplace item?

🛣️ Defining our approach

🧑‍🔬 Lab Time: Usability Tests for a deeper diagnosis

Task 1: Return Socks (URBN Item)

Task 2: Return Napkins (Marketplace Item)

🔬 What problems did we find?

⚗️ Analyzing the core problems in detail

1. URBN CTA is too prominent and attracts all attention

The URBN CTA is so prominent that takes attention away from the Marketplace CTA.

2. Marketplace Return CTA is hard to spot

The Return CTA for the marketplace is barely a CTA. It is hard to spot as it is just a link. Users mostly miss this CTA and try to return the Item by clicking the URBN CTA.

3. Users are having problems differentiating b/w the two return processes

Users do not realize that there are two distinct sellers with two distinct return processes. The problem is that the Marketplace seller information is hard to spot.

4. Narvar poorly handles Marketplace Return information

Narvar tells the user 'Not eligible for returns' which is not entirely true as the items can be returned but through a different process. The other copy says 'Contact seller for returns' without providing any information on how to do so.

DESIGNING A NEW EXPERIENCE

🧑‍🎨 Design goals to solve the problems

⚠️ Constraints when designing

Order History: URBN's order history page was the most visited page of the entire website and they did not any changes to it that disrupted their business. There had to be a change, but it was highly recommended that it should be as minimal as possible
Prioritizing the 'View Tracking Button': The 'View Tracking Button' was the most used button on URBN's Order History page. It was mentioned that this Button should always be a primary button.
Edit Constraints: Narvar(3rd Party App to return URBN Items), where most of the design problems existed, had a limit on edits: one message which could be 20 characters max.

🧗 Going all out with design explorations (Figma Link)

🙌 Narrowing it down to two main iterations

LINE ITEM ITERATION

SHIPMENT LEVEL ITERATION

DESIGN DECISION: Return CTA was removed from the top and placed at the level of the item or product

REASON: This way users could easily find the return options for each item, as the return option is close to the item to be returned (law of proximity).

DESIGN DECISION: Return CTA was removed from the top and placed at the same level as the other Shipment details.

REASON: This way users could easily associate the different return processes to their respective sellers as the return button is close to the seller's name (law of proximity).

🧪 Putting the two iterations to a test

The iterations were then sent through an A/B Usability Test where the users were given 2 tasks: 1) Return the URBN item and 2) Return the Marketplace Item. This was done so that we can understand how well these two iterations help us achieve our design goals set earlier:

Goal A: Understanding why there is a difference between the return process of Marketplace vs URBN Item
Goal B: Discoverability of Marketplace return CTA

🥅 How did the iterations perform on our design goals?

LINE ITEM ITERATION

Key Takeaway: The users were able to spot the buttons to return each item easily as it is very close to the item that is being returned.

Key Takeaway: After finding the return button for the item the users do not look at the seller which is mentioned in a very small font size. This makes them think the item is a URBN item.

SHIPMENT LEVEL ITERATION

Key Takeaway: The users were able to spot the buttons to return each after looking closely.

Key Takeaway: The users were able to spot the seller after looking near the return buttons.

🏆 So, who won?

Test Conclusion: Both iterations performed significantly better than the original version in terms of our two design goals.

The line item and shipment level both performed the same in terms of how many users were able to return the Marketplace item. In terms of understanding the reason for different return processes.

Overall shipment level performed better than the line item in Goal B, therefore Shipment Level is the WINNER!

🎬 Usability testing conclusions for Shipment Level Iteration

🤔 Narvar copy is still a problem, what can we do?

As found through the usability tests, Narvar's messaging is still a problem. There need for a copy edit at minimum to make sure users are not confused about the return eligibility of Marketplace items.