Decreasing Pier1.com's Users' Bounce Rate.

Our Main Challenge?

I was assigned the task of uncovering the issues leading to the reoccurring negative reviews and the high customers' bounce rate on Pier1.com. To give you an idea about Pier1.com, it is the highest performing brand of Retail E-commerce Ventures and it was expected to bring in the most revenue during the holiday season. My challenge was that as an intern, I was given minimal access to internal analytics of the company, so I had to conduct a lot of my own research to come up with the necessary conclusions and design decisions. And by the time I was handed this project, I had less than a month left of my internship.

My research strategy was mainly quantitative depending on analytics and real life customer reviews from various sources. This was mainly because the website was already active and any applied assumptions will directly be tested by real life users.

Throughout my research, I asked the following questions:

What are our customer's behaviors and habits while visiting our website?
How are our users feeling about our brand and services?
What are the issues with the website?
What are the issues contributing to the negative reviews?

What I learned from Research?

I started by checking our customer demographics & behaviors to understand the purchasing habits and the average duration spent on each page. I found out that the bounce rate is at 32% and that most users are taking a similar path through our website (Homepage --> Item's page --> Cart --> Checkout --> Payment). I adopted this path as the primary user flow through my research. I also looked at customer reviews and quality assessed the website for issues in functionality and usability, which helped me pinpoint the main issues/user problems.

Main User Problems

	Reviews are from Trustpilot.com

Through my research I encountered a lot of user problems, yet, the major three that needed immediate resolving - were causing the majority of the negative reviews - were related to the cancellation policy, the return/refund policy, and customer service. The users were not properly informed of the cancellation and refund policies, and upon contacting customer support were disappointed by the outcome. As for the high bounce rate it was mainly caused by the functionality issues and glitches encountered on the website. These included mismatched links, dead-end links found on empty collection pages, result disappearance upon their aggregation, malfunctioning filters, disappearing images, etc.

I documented my finding and communicated them on a daily basis with the team during our meetings to fix functionality issues as soon as they surface. I also updated the backlog and created several tasks on Jira which were reassigned to the responsible entities (Developers - Designers - Pull Marketing - CS/Tech Ops). And I created a customer journey map to communicate the main user problems and enhance empathy. Overall, my efforts contributed to increased awareness among team members and a unified understanding of the problems at hand.

Design Targets:

After going over the customer journey map with the team and conducting several meetings discussing the issues at hand, we all agreed on the following design targets and came up with an action plan to meet these targets.

My contribution:

Since we had limited time to implement the solutions especially with the beginning of the holiday season, we divided the tasks among the team. And I was the only intern taking part in the direct enhancement of the website. In addition to quality assessing the pages and providing design suggestions, I handled some redesigns and software testing.

Disclaimer Redesign:

Current Solution

Proposed Solution

The disclaimer is more prominent.
The information is chunked for simplicity.

Chatbot Testing

After the research discoveries and communicating the impact of the negative customer reviews during meetings. The Tech team decided to deploy Insync AI, a chatbot dedicated for customer service & support. This bot learns upon exposure and can help users with basic issues such as tracking shipments, refunds, etc. My job was to improve the usability of Insync AI by testing it and interacting with it.

I tested the bot 3 times, reporting back to our DevOps team issues in logic, question sequence, and functionality. I also updated these issues on Jira and assigned them to the responsible entity for improvement.

Impact?

What worked well?
The bounce rate on Pier1 decreased by 20.16% after implementing some of the above-mentioned changes. My research & efforts has lead to users spending more time on individual pages. We also started to see some improvements in the overall customer reviews on different rating websites.

What I learned	What I would do differently?
I saw firsthand the impact that user reviews can have on stakeholders. I learned that dividing an action plan into smaller manageable tasks will make it achievable among team members. I learned that scheduling meetings for presenting major issues is better to raise awareness and stress urgency instead of sharing them in team wide meetings.	I would have reminded the different team members in the daily meeting of the updates on Jira to keep a better pace and follow up on the issues.