Situation
MOO has a great USP—Printfinity. This functionality enables customers to print a number of unique designs on the reverse of printed products, like flyers and business cards.
Problem
From August to September 2018, MOO UK's customer services team received 34 complaints related to this functionality. Whilst complaint numbers were relatively low, it was identified as being the 3rd biggest issue customers faced whilst designing their printed assets.
Goals
Research why customers were facing this issue and implement a fix to reduce complaints by 25%.
My Role
Investigated the problem and frequency in conjunction with customer services.
Formed assumptions with the squad and translated these into hypotheses to shape research activities.
Designed solutions and setup up a working prototype.
Ran guerrilla usability testing to further validate our assumptions.
Devised a test plan alongside the research team to set-up a remote usability test (usertesting.com).
Another journey I was investigating at this time: ~85K unique visitors per month, of which 98% were dropping off.
Complication
Understanding: Why were customers facing this issue?
Team Alignment: Capturing stakeholder knowledge and forming shared assumptions.
Implementation: Styling, layout or content adjustments - avoiding any significant changes that could potentially disrupt the global service.
Outcome Expectation
Failing to understand why the issue existed and therefore being unable to act on it, carried risk. Customers would continue to have a negative experience, which was likely to affect revenue and customer retention. The costs to handle complaints would also still remain.
And then…
Team alignment and implementation — if we didn't get these right, our fix had the potential to disrupt the global service, due to the system architecture handling multiple locales. In this event, lost revenue and a negative customer experience would be seen on a much larger scale.
Remedial Action
Building Empathy
I joined forces with the customer services department to find out more about the problem from the customer's perspective.
Looking at call verbatim, trends were identified in what customers were experiencing.
Customers said…
"Trashcan buttons are confusing. Had to start project over 2 times. Found it very time consuming."
"Buttons are confusing "Hmm. That's something that needs to be addressed. Huge waste of time. A simple undo button would do the trick."
Evaluation
A heuristic evaluation of the journey was conducted, which enabled problems to be identified. This was also opened up to the wider team to contribute/share knowledge.
Issues Identified
Two near identical, unlabelled trashcans.
Each trashcan handles a different action.
The proximity of the trash cans are very close to each other.
One trash can deletes a unique back.
The other trash can deletes an image on a unique back.
If a customer had 5 unique designs on the back of a business card and accidentally deleted a back instead of a design, they had 2 options: Go with 4 unique designs or start again.
Team Alignment
The KPI the team and I were working towards was to reduce complaints by 25% and the associated costs in handling these. The cost to service complaints: Emails £12 and £8 for phone calls.
I created a Needs Goals canvas to capture strategic project information and for alignment.
The engineering teams assumptions were also captured, to better understand suitable fixes, given the constraint of keeping the treatment light-touch. The team unanimously agreed that 2 simple fixes had a very high chance of preventing the issue.
We believed…
Adding the correct signage to trash cans, would reduce user uncertainty.
Positioning the toolbar closer to the preview window would see less confusion.
Validating Assumptions
Two variants were created in a staged environment. Both had labels to describe the trashcan's actions. The navigation was also placed above and below the toolbar to see which was most logical.
Four people in the office were shown a screen-grab from the staged environment. They were asked to complete 2 activities for each variant. This would allow us to determine if it was clear how to delete an image and a unique back.
End Results
Our hypotheses were true
Moving the navigation bar above the toolbar and adding labels to the trashcan icons, resulted in all participants being able to complete the activities.
Before releasing changes into production, further validation was required to ensure the solution was robust and had the best chances of achieving the KPI.
To validate/invalidate our hypotheses, users need to…
Design a business card with 3 different designs on the reverse.
Upload 3 separate designs.
Replace an image from one of the backs.
Add an additional design on one of the backs.
Summary
Evaluated the current experience and witnessed the issue first hand.
Devised a tactical solution that would not disrupt the global service.
Validated the solution with 4 participant, all of which were able to distinguish between deleting an image and deleting a back.
