1. Executive Summary

    In this project, I mainly focus on analyzing the user experience of ASOS and redesigning it based on user research and customer behavior. The enduring goal of this thesis is to improve the user experience of online shopping in ASOS. During the research, I have adopted both quantitative and qualitative methods to finish three personas (based on the interview of four target customers of ASOS), and coalesce them into a revised one, one customer journey map, and one service blueprint. 

ASOS is the largest British online fashion and cosmetic retailer. It was founded in 2000 in London, primarily aimed ata client base aged between 20-30 years. The website sells over 850 brands as well as its own range of clothing and accessories. ASOS operates and distributes its product globally, shipping to all 196 countries from fulfillment centers in the UK, USA, Europe, and Asia. In 2020, the online fashion retailer made a pretax profit of GBP3262.5 million, with over 23 million active customers. Despite a large number of users and huge turnover, ASOS’ overall user experience is still relatively low. According to Baymard Institute, ASOS’ overall e-commerce user experience performance (both desktop web and mobile web) is merely mediocre, while the mobile APP UX performance is only poor, leaving a large room for improvement and iteration.

    In my project of iteration of ASOS, through interviewing the target users, the needs and expectations of the target customers for the online shopping platform can be summarized into three categories, which are first, users’ expectation of saving money and getting coupons and discounts, second, users cannot visualize the clothes, and last, users’ need of facilitating the process of return and refund of the products. According to official user survey data, 76% of ASOS users are twenty-something-fashion lovers, who like to search and talk about fashion on social media: avid consumer and communicator who is inspired by friends, celebrities, and the media. Based on these features, I have created three personas with three keywords that meet the three specific needs mentioned above. Based on the personas, I have created a customer journey map exploring the whole process of the online shopping experience, from the discovery of the APP to the final steps, comments on the product, from the perspective of the users of ASOS. The service blueprint, targeting more on the product, is based on a more general scope, three personas and the users’ features found in ASOS official data. In the service blueprint, I have added more functions and user interfaces and raised suggestions for possible iteration for the APP, including the upgrade of the comment section, immediate refund, return at door service, and streaming sales activities.

 

2. Methods

2.1 User research

    User research was the integral and first step in shaping the outcome of my thesis. Throughout the process, I separated myself from users, identified patterns in their behavior, analyze their goals and pain points in the experience of online shopping, and developed empathy for them. After defining target users as 20 to 30-year-old females who shop online frequently and care about fashion in a moderate to a high amount, I seek to understand their motivations, shopping behavior, needs, and pains within the context of shopping online. In this section, I have adopted both a qualitative method, interview, and use quantitative tools, the official data from the ASOS website to finish three personas. After gathering the feedback from the peers, I coalesce them into one revised persona.

 

2.1.1 Interview

       With the goal of gaining empathy for users and understanding their unmet needs, I conducted interviews with four people in the target demographic whose locations vary from the UK, USA, to eastern Asia. Instead of asking specific questions related to my project, I construct an interview guide to establish the primary questions and separated myself and subjectivity from the participants. I keep the base questions extremely general and let the interviewees guide where the conversations end up. 

    The interview can be divided into three parts which aim at different purposes: questions start from the basic and general questions like How often do you shop online? to more specific questions that require the interviewees to rank from zero to five like While using a shopping APP, which of the following functions will increase your willingness to buy its product? (Rank from 0 to 5), then to open questions investigating their usual online shopping experience like Please describe one of your most memorable shopping experiences (The full questionnaire is in the appendix). The first part can be answered with a simple phrase, which allows the interviewee to open the topic and makes it easier to extract the interviewee’s keywords. The second part is to use the rating to facilitate the quantitative analysis of the answer from the interviewees in the later sections. The third part is led by the interviewees, telling their personal experiences, which could help discover new user needs and expectations. In the interview with the third respondent, she has mentioned the streaming shopping function in the online shopping APP, which provides a new perspective for visualizing the products (The keynotes of the interview are in the appendix). The interview for each respondent lasts from 30 mins to one hour.

 

2.1.2 Official data collection

       To obtain more accurate data to support the extraction of user characteristics in personas, and to neutralize individual differences in qualitative research and get more universal user characteristics, I have consulted ASOS' E-Commerce UX report from Baymard Institute, Mintel Young Fashion Report and ASOS finance analysis to obtained more official data on ASOS’ user behaviors/habits, user characteristics, and user expectations. According to the data, the ASOS customer believes: 67% under 25’s think how they look is important; 2/3 19-25-year-olds shop online since it’s fast-paced and easy; 18-21-year-olds tend to shop according to discount. 

 

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    According to Baymard Institute, ASOS’s overall e-commerce UX performance is mediocre. Their UX is in large part diminished by poor Order Tracking & Returns, poor On-Site Search, and mediocre Cart & Checkout. After gathering the data from the interview and ASOS official, I am able to group the data, find the keywords, and build the personas.

 

2.1.3 User personas

    I used user persona to stylize information about demographics, shopping habits, gains, motivations, goals, and pain points. The goal of user persona is not only to provide an easy and quick overview of data concerning the target audience but serve the purpose to keep me focused on the most relevant characteristics of the user interacting with the platform. User persona also helped me to start processing research patterns in terms of the user journey. As mentioned in the executive summary, based on the interviews and other data found in ASOS official, Baymard Institute, and Mintel Young Fashion Report, I categorize the users’ needs and expectations for ASOS into three types: visualizing the product, financial concerns, and easy and convenient return service, and based on the needs, three personas are built to meet these three concerns.

    The first persona is Yujia Yan, a 24-year-old female auditor who lives in LA. The keyword for this persona is authenticity: the largest need for her is to visualize the product and get the same product with what the product pictures show in the APP. Thus, the gains she’s looking for are an online shopping platform with streaming sales function and real comments and pictures of the products.

    The second persona is Carrie Zhao, a 23-year-old graduate student at Georgetown University. The keyword for her is economical: she cares most about the discount and price of the clothes.

    The third persona is Yohann Andrews, a 23-year-old freelance photographer who has a unique pursuit of fashion and likes to find some stylish and avant-garde clothes online, thus he often needs to return products. The keyword of this persona is convenience: the most important need for him is convenient and fast return services.

     Based on the second persona, I coalesce the first and third persona to build the final revised personal. ASOS is a relatively low-end shopping application, so students and young employees with relatively low incomes are its most representative user groups. Therefore, Carrie Zhao, who is more concerned about prices, is more representative and suitable for a user persona. However, some features of Yujia Yan and Yohann Andrews have also been added to complete this persona, such as the demand for streaming sales function, real product reviews and photos, and concerns about returns and refund services. In this way, this persona generally concludes all the features including goals, motivations, and frustrations of the customers of ASOS. In terms of design, the revised version has also made some adjustments. The profile picture is zoomed out, leaving more space for the columns on the right side. With one module moved from the left-right corner to the middle column, the whole display becomes clear and less text-heavy.

 

2.2 Customer journey map

    Based on the revised user persona, I was able to build a customer journey map. The customer’s journey map is user-oriented and aimed at reconstructing the entire process of the user experience when performing a search, browse, purchase, review and return behavior on ASOS. I split the whole service process into five sections, 1. discovery: find the APP on the social media; 2. registration and first use: become a member and browse the products; 3. purchase and accept the service: purchase and get the products; 4. return: return the products, but this step may not necessarily occur; 5. review: accept the products and write comments and post pictures about them.

    Since this journey map is a visual representation of a user’s interactions with ASOS from their point of view, I have adopted users’ emotions and frustrations to fulfill the interactions in the activities. From the emotion bars, the second (registration and first use), fourth (return), and the last (review) steps have relatively low emotional value, which leaves a large room for ASOS to iterate and redesign. These three steps are also the key focus of my later redesign of ASOS.

 

2.3 Customer Service Blueprint

    Unlike persona and journey maps, Service Blueprint is more product-oriented. It gives a complete picture of how the service and related experience is delivered, end to end, front to back and across channels. It provides a high-level view of the user experience and a detailed view of what is going on below the surface. In this service blueprint, I also divide the whole service process into five steps, discovery, pre-purchase (or registration and first use in the customer journey map), purchase and receive the product, return, and review. Besides the front-stage interactions with the customers, I focus more on the back-stage activities and support processes. After the functions of streaming sales and comment section are added to ASOS, the corresponding backstage interactions such as customer comments monitoring, comment storage, product recommendation optimization and support processes like streamer training, comment interface design should also follow to support the whole system working. Support processes can be divided into two categories, employee training and technical support. Staff training includes the training of photographers, visual designers and streamers, which together provide better visual information content display services of the products to the audience in the user interface; Data technical supports includes registration database, browsing history tracking system and comment monitoring system help conduct product recommendation/comment optimization and improve the comments shown and suggestions of products users, showing the users the clothes and the comment they want to see most.

 

3. Result & Discussion

    In this section, I will list the market demand and users’ frustration and concerns for ASOS I have obtained from the user research. Based on the needs from the market, I have added three key functions to the ASOS platform, which are streaming sales activities, comment section, “return at door” service. This section would also cover how I iterate for ASOS, how the new functions are reflected in the three deliverables, and how the frontstage and backstage techniques and personnel support the service.

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3.1 Users’ needs/what the market hope ASOS achieve

    I have collected some of the quotes of customers’ needs and frustration of ASOS online shopping experience from their storytelling in a total of three hours of interviews with four people and have categorized them with different keywords. Here are the results.

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• Frustrations with shopping online

• Not knowing what size to order 

“You never know what size. You can’t really try it on.”

“I’m confused about the size all the time because once I get the wrong size, I have to return, which causes a lot of trouble.”

• Can’t visualize items 

“Sometimes I don’t buy because I can’t imagine how the clothes are on actual people.”

“If you can’t try things on, color, size, and perception, you can never really know for sure.”

• Hard to return 

“Taking clothes to UPS stores really stops me from returning and pushes me to accept the clothes I don’t like.”

“I don’t like the returning process; it takes so long time to finish and get the refund.”

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• Needs for the online shopping experience

• Reliable testimonials 

“The comments really matter. Comments with all have good experiences with the product quality or design really persuade me.”

“If I see someone write down something that I like or I care about the product, I’ll order it.”

“The photos or videos of the real products, especially on the real people are more important than the model pictures.”

• Promotions

“The stores who’re having sales. I don’t buy things full price online.”

“Shopping online for me the most attractive part is getting coupons and discounts.”

• Quick and convenient return service

“[I choose stores based on] like the speed of delivery and if I can return my clothes at my door, I would be more willing to purchase.”

    These needs and pain points are also reflected in three personas. To meet those expectations and alleviate the pain points, I come up with three functions to redesign ASOS to provide a better user experience. For the pain point that customers can’t visualize the item and do not know the size, and the need for reliable testimonials and promotions, I would add a live streaming sales function and live commerce interface into the front page. For the pain point, that customers do not know the size and the need for having reliable testimonials, I would introduce the comment sections into the clothes description interface. For the pain point of the difficult return process and the need for quick and convenient return service, the “return at the door” service could solve the problem.

 

3.2 Live streaming sales interface

    Live streaming is a new type of Internet sales method that sells products to viewers through streaming. Streaming sales is today’s version of “shoptainment”. Streamers showcase products dynamically, interact with their audiences and build urgency with short-term offers, giveaways and limited-edition items. This strategy grabs up huge attention of the crowd focusing on branding and the products. Adding the live sales function in ASOS, the appeal and strategy of exaggerated expression and time-limited coupons are the strong tools to call the audience to get involved and purchase, which would result in a huge growth in sales. 

    Streaming sales also meet the users’ need of getting coupons and discounts. Streaming sales, with its relatively low price and urgent short-term offers, would increase the viewer’s traffic of the brand, satisfying people's desire for discounts and boosting people’s willingness to purchase. 

    In addition, the live sales allow viewers to see the overall presentation of clothes on people in a more direct way, allowing customers to see the actual color, material, and design of the clothes, and maximize the visualization of online products, which alleviate the second frustration, the users can’t visualize the items. During the streaming, customers can send real-time comments, ask the streaming hosts about product-related questions in the interaction box. By solving customers’ questions and concerns, their willingness to purchase would increase.

 

3.2.1 Live streaming interface design

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    Open direct access to live sales on the front page, click that stream button to get to the streaming interface. The boxes on the interface would show the products or the brands of that streaming sales would promote with each streamers’ profile attached at the bottom of the box. By clicking on the box, the users can enter the streaming sales.

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    The pink shopping bags button (1) is set in the lower-left corner of the live broadcast interface. Clicking into the shopping bag will display the link of the clothes sold in the field. On the right side of the Shopping bags is the text box (2). You can interact with the streamer through the text box. The entered questions or comments will be displayed in the interaction (3) above. Set the like button (4) on the right side of the text box. The audience can click the like button to increase the like of the streamers and that streaming sale, those who get more like will get more traffic. The more popular the live streamer gets, the higher ranking and higher exhibition place in the live streaming interface I will the streamer would get. Next, the model information (6), including height and weight, is displayed above the streamer (5) so that the audience can see the size of the clothes. The brand name/product type (7) is displayed in the upper left corner to facilitate the viewers to click into the store to purchase similar styles/types of clothing. The coupon link (8) is set on the upper right, and users can click on this button to receive time-limited and exclusive coupons for the live streaming sales.

 

3.2.2 The backstage interaction and support process

• Personnel: Employee training and recruiting

Adding the live streaming function will require the support of streaming hosts, assistants, operators, and other personnel, which requires a lot of staff training and recruitment, especially the training of streaming hosts. The streamer directly affects the atmosphere and sales of the live streaming sales. The host’s streaming skills, strategy, tone, manners of displaying clothes, and understanding of the product all require a lot of training.

• Technically: Browsing history tracking system & product recommendation system

To provide the streaming sales that the customers are interested in most, the recommendation optimization has to be done based on the browsing history tracking system: monitor the users’ search and browsing history to find out their needs and preference. The product recommendation engines include content-based filtering, to analyze a shopper’s previous purchase preferences and past choices to create a preference profile; collaborative filtering, to consider data from multiple shoppers and sources and cross-references their purchase histories to predict what a particular customer would like; and hybrid recommendations, to combine the content-based and collaborative-based methods.

 

3.2.3 The potential risks and threats

• The lack of audience

Live streaming sales need a large number of viewers to get high sales, which means the APP needs to have a large number of users/customer groups. However, ASOS’s customer base is relatively small compared to YouTube and Tik Tok, targeting people of all-age and all-profession. Geographically, customers of ASOS are more dispersed in different time zones, which is destined to have fewer simultaneous online users. The user base is small which may affect the sales. In this way, live sales may not reach the expected value in ASOS. 

• Streamers may be lack skills

Streaming sales require extremely high skills, including how to display products to incite everyone to buy, how to issue limited-time coupons, and how to use a time-limited sec-killing to drive the audience's emotions and increase their desire to buy. It takes a long time to practice. However, live streaming sales in Europe and North America have not yet been popularized, and there is no systematic training course, which may result in insufficient streaming capabilities and skills of the streamers.

 

3.3 Comment section

    Adding a comment section in ASOS would optimize the shopping experience by allowing potential customers of the product to better understand the product through the real feedback of former buyers, in which way, they can buy clothes that meet their expectations. In this way, it alleviates the first and second frustrations that customers can’t know the size and can’t visualize the items. Besides, the function of future buyers asking questions to former buyers is also added, so that potential customers can have more channels to ask questions and obtain the details and the information of the product. The evaluation of the former buyers is also more reliable, meeting customers' needs for reliable testimonials, which would, in turn, increase customers’ willingness to buy and increase sales.

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    The rate of return would also decrease, due to the customers’ better knowledge of the product. The comment function is also conducive to ASOS's internal collection of customer preference data on clothes, and the characteristics of certain clothes, brands, and clothing designers. 

3.3.1 The backstage interaction and support process

• Invitation and reward system

At first, to encourage users to post more comments, when the orders are completed, ASOS will send auto emails and messages in the app to remind the users to comment and get the reward for the comment. The rewards will be sent to users in the form of Points. This requires a reward system and an automatic e-mail response system to be established.

• Comment monitoring system & optimization of content displaying

When comments gradually increase, the comments need to be categorized and monitored. High-quality comments with pictures, comments with more words, more likes, and more views need to be displayed at the top of the list, while some meaningless comments and abusive negative comments need to be filtered. This requires a comment monitoring system to control reviews and to optimize the content presented to new customers.

 

3.4 “Return at the door” service

    The current ASOS return method is very cumbersome. First, the user needs to request a return application on the return interface, print the return label, and then take the packaged clothes that need to be returned to the nearby UPS store for return. The return service at the door would save the customer's journey from home to the UPS store. The deliveryman picks up the returned clothes at the door. All the customers need to do is to make an appointment for a return on the mobile phone. This alleviates the third frustration, clothes are hard to return, and meets the third requirement, quick and convenient return services.

 

3.4.1 The backstage interaction and support process

• Cooperate with the express company

The logistics of ASOS are outsourced to the courier company, FedEx. To establish the service that requires the deliveryman to pick up the returned clothes at the door, ASOS needs to reach a cooperation agreement with FedEx by increasing the expense of cooperation.

• Return and refund interface design & parcel tracking system

Due to the change of return service, the return and refund interface design should also be changed. From the beginning of the request for return, it is necessary to track the return process since the customers have to know the time when the deliveryman picks up the parcel. This requires the parcel tracking system to be upgraded.

3.4.2 The potential risks and threats

• The express company may reject the cooperation

This makes the delivery staff who originally only need to deliver the parcels at the door also need to be responsible for picking up the packages at the door. This has led to an increase in the need for deliverymen, which greatly increases the transportation labor cost of the courier company. It is possible that the cooperation cost will be increased significantly, or the cooperation will be declined. Once the company refuses to cooperate, this service will not be available for a short time.

• The return rate may increase

Due to the reduced time and labor cost of returning clothes, it becomes easier for customers to return, which may lead to a surge in the number of returns within a period of time.

 

4. Recommendation

    Although three new functions have been added or have been improved, the user needs and goals for ASOS are still not fully satisfied, such as long refund time, long express time, insufficient intelligence of product search engines, incomplete product categories, crowded interface, etc. These are still the problems that remain to be solved to improve the user experience of online shopping in ASOS. In addition, the three functions that have been proposed also have risks and threats that have to be alleviated and circumvented. Streaming sales maybe be lacking audience; Opening up the customer review function may result in a large number of abusive negative reviews; improving the return service may increase the product return rate. The new services still need to be iterated.

    However, how to further improve the user experience of ASOS is still an important and complex issue that ASOS needs to consider. Both the users’ journey map and the service blueprint leave a lot of room for adjustment and improvement. In addition to the above three services, there are some other services that ASOS can consider: 1. Providing the immediate refund function for memberships; 2. Adopting the membership points system, the points can be exchanged for coupons and discounts; 3. Encourage sharing between the customers, and order sharing on social media can earn points.