Account Personalization
Account profiles and the authenticated user experience
Home Depot’s 2018 Account initiatives oversaw mainly enhancements to security and account access. As we move into 2019, our goals are shifting with our company wide initiative to a more personalized customer experience.
In particular, we’re looking to improve the account experience, increase user retention, and focus on our core account users: DIY customers who make up 85% of our sign ins. Currently, only ~15% registered customers sign in to their accounts. Of all the sign ins we get, around 75% of sign ins are from bottom of funnel, whereas only 25% customers sign in from the top of the funnel.
Current stats & problems
The Goal
How might we provide value to our customers to so they sign in further up the funnel and are more likely to be repeat customers?
Research
Testing the current experience
Test note taking
Matrix of test notes to find trends
Information Architecture
Card Sort for Navigation Structure
MVP Dashboard
Designs
Wireframing
High Fidelity Designs for Personalized Account Dashboard
Pivoting the Designs
Persona building
Personalized Home Page Designs
What’s Next
Suggested Test and Target ideas
The Process
Research
First, I compiled a competitive analysis of other account landing pages and dashboards. I focused on ecommerce sites but also gained inspiration from other websites that are heavy on user account information, such as airlines, spotify, and tech companies. Some trends I noticed are:
Left Navigation Bar, (Headers with descriptor subheaders)
Quick Links with and without icons
Widgets for promoted areas of the site, additional information the user needs to fill out, recommended items,
Big numbers, Account Balances, Points, Frequent Flyer miles, Gift Card Balances, gamification aspect
Defaulting to Orders Page
Empty Pages have a promotional aspect. “Haven’t made a wish-list yet? Here’s some cool icons and why you should make one. Let’s help you get started!”
Some account dashboards have nice hero graphics to welcome the user or promote a feature. (Spotify, American Airlines, West Elm, Instacart, Asos)
Testing the baseline experience
How is our current experience doing?
Before we began designing, we wanted to identify our current problem areas. I worked with our researcher to narrow down the areas of focus, and took and organized notes.
Our Objectives
Identify usability issues within current production My Account (Account) and Orders & Purchases (O&P) task flows
Understand customers’ perceptions of value associated with various features within Account and O&P
Identify needs for additional user research efforts
The Methodology
Remote moderated user study of ten participants recruited from the UserTesting panel, ranging in age from 23 to 53.
All have accounts online with at least 3 – 5 retailers
These were one hour test sessions, covering the following features:
Create and sign into an Account
Email Preferences
Profile
Address Book
Saved Credit Cards
My Ratings & Reviews
My Window Treatments
Lists / Favorites
Find a List
Online Orders
Subscriptions
In Store Orders
In Store e-Receipts
Condensing and analyzing the information
Below are the notes I took in Mural during the test sessions while our researcher focused on moderating the user. I started taking observations for each user. Afterwards I organized them into categories to create a sort of heat map for my researcher and I to more easily identify trends and problem areas.
The Testing Results:
Users approach and think about their account in a more holistic manner than our current organization of Account and Orders & Purchases features/elements.
Although email subscription options were appreciated, settings related to email notifications were also expected.
Users expect a more integrated and coherent organization of account elements – both when creating their account and when accessing or updating information later.
More clear and impactful feedback is needed for Save Changes on Profile.
My Ratings & Reviews are of limited use and interest.
My Window Treatments feels out of place to users within Account Information, and they wonder why window treatments has a specific section and other product categories do not.
‘Lists’ and ‘Favorites’ are both used for the same features, and this inconsistency leads to significant user confusion.
For current/open Store Pickup orders participants want to know how long the item will be held before the order is cancelled and the product re-shelved. This same finding was observed in other recent Orders & Purchases testing.
Users don’t know what product categories are eligible or simply well suited for the Subscriptions feature. Further, it is difficult to locate subscription eligible products.
Information Architecture
With all the feedback from our testing sessions, it was clear that we had some fundamental navigation issues. Keeping the test user’s problem areas in mind, we reorganized the navigation items in a card sort.
In particular, we renamed items within Orders and Purchases to custom orders, In-store transactions, online orders, and subscriptions. We moved “My window Treatments” to a lower item within custom orders, combined in-store receipts and in-store orders, and moved subscriptions from account information to orders and purchases.
We also clarified the credit and gift card section to explicitly say “Home Depot Credit Cards” to avoid confusion with the customers other credit cards.
Lists and Favorites was a content strategy problem site wide, and we’re looking at the possibility to rename it to “Projects,” or “Project Lists,” based on the user’s feedback that they are mostly making lists with a project in mind.
The new dashboard MVP
Currently Home Depot accounts do not have a dashboard and are instead navigated to their profile, whether they wanted to go there or not.
I created this MVP dashboard based on our new understanding of the information architecture.
This would alleviate the navigation pain points users were having while we continued to think about a personalized dashboard,
Personalized Account Wireframing
With the improved information architecture, we then brainstormed on how to increase user’s engagement with their Home Depot accounts. Some things we explored in the below wireframe white-boarding session were:
Reminders
Review your recent order
Shopping History
Recommended Products for You
Questionnaire
Gamification of Account Completion
Surfaced frequently used sections such as Orders and Favorites/Lists
High Fidelity Design
To sell the vision to our leadership, I then translated these wireframes to mock-ups to better communicate what we could do with a more personalized account experience.
This dashboard would evolve based on the more they use the site, so we can surface more important widgets.
The more data we have, the more personalized we can get so we have little nudges included to have the user complete more of their profile with a gamified profile completion, leveling, and points, as well as a questionnaire.
Here we showed an example of a user who we have more data on.
Here we know the user has bought air filters so we ask them if they want to start a subscription for that item, since it’s a common subscription amongst our users.
If we know that this user has signed up for workshops in the store before, then we can surface upcoming workshops.
If we know they are a highly engaged user then we can start to ask them to leave reviews for recently purchased items.
Pivoting the Design
After sharing the personalized dashboard concepts with leadership, we learned from their feedback that while they loved the personalization ideas, there was limited opportunity in the account space.
While we had plenty of authenticated users, only about 1% of our users ever went to their account profile. So we rethought our initial idea and thought maybe we could bring those personalization elements into a page that is visited more often, such as the Home Page.
It was often remarked on how, “if I’m a house painter, why are you showing me nest thermostats when I land on the site?” We knew so much about our users but we weren’t leveraging it as much as we could. So the question became: How can we tailor the site to user when they arrive at the site?
The New User Journey
Our Sample Persona
To illustrate our user journey, we used a sample persona to better show a before and after and all the changes included.
We took the questionnaire from the account dashboard and placed it on the homepage for authenticated users.
Our user fills in some standard questions that could help us bring their relevant information, such as what kind of home do they have, what kind of projects do they work on, do they use subscriptions, or have a certain Home Depot store location they typically visit.
They can then dive deeper if they so choose, into the categories of products they are interested in. As a user selects high level categories we surface more specific categories within that broad category. There are up to three levels of these categories called L1, L2, L3.
The new personalized Home Page
After the user hits submit, we show the newly personalized home page influenced by their selections.
Here we see:
“Top Links For You,” including account related links
Product categories they were interested in
Banners relating to their interest (In this example we know they like to decorate and have previously bought holiday decorations last year.)
Products based off browsing history
Products based off order history
Service promotions based on how they typically have hired help for installations and projects.
And local store information
What’s Next?
We will be conducting further testing to see if any of these features resonate with our users, or if there’s anything they would want or expect to have that we haven’t already included. While we’re doing these qualitative tests, we’ll be implementing these smaller personalized sections on the live site to gather data for more quantitative feedback.
