Omni-Channel Furniture Shopping Experience
This is a sponsored course group project. The high-level objective is to understand the process customers experience when purchasing a large piece of furniture and what helps establish customer confidence during their journey.
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(The visuals you see on this page are coming from the final UXR report. It is for showcasing my research reporting ability.)
Background and Goal
The sponsor needs evidence from research to understand the focus of their product improvement in improving the customers' omni-channel furniture shopping experience
Generative Research Goals
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Understand the customer process of purchasing a large piece of furniture to build our understanding of the customer journey and identify pain points.
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Provide recommendations in terms of potential tools/resources, innovations, or strategies as it pertains to the challenges they face.
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Design Research Goals
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Identify the step-by-step process customers go through when shopping for large-piece furniture.
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Understand the factors that the customer would consider when going through the shopping process.
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Investigate the additional tools/information that would be helpful for decision-making.
Method
We first distributed a survey with the intention of analyzing the survey responses to guide our questions design for our in-depth interviews. The survey questions were formulated around customers' process of shopping online and in-store, what tools or technology they've used, what factors are important to them, and more. Raffle incentives were used in recruiting the participants (two $100 gift cards)
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Then, we follow up with contextual inquiries. Each of the group members conducted 5 contextual inquiries at different furniture stores. We generally observed their shopping behavior for 30-45 minutes. Incentives of $25 and $50 VISA gift cards were used.
Key Findings
Furniture Shopping Journey
Need
Research and Preparation
Shopping Process
Commitment / Purchase
Post-Purchase
User needs are identified (i.e., new home, home removation etc.)
Users may prepare by measuring the space for the needed furniture.
Users engage in their shopping journey by visiting stores or browsing on websites.
A decision point is made about a commitment to purchase.
Furniture is delivered or needed to be assembled.
We defined this journey map as a general and holistic experience when users are thinking about and purchasing furniture.​
Pain Points and Recommendations
Along with the above furniture shopping journey, we also identified the customer pain points and made our recommendations for improving the customer's shopping experience.
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Most people use online websites/apps to begin researching the furniture they are looking for and assessing quality is their highest priority.
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Pain Points: It's difficult to assess quality online.​
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Recommendation: In addition to an overall 5-star rating system, provide a more detailed customer rating system online to allow customers to evaluate the furniture's quality (texture, stableness, durability, etc.)​
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Shoppers often want to browse and compare similar-style items. (i.e., a brown mid-century dining table) when shopping in physical stores.​
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Pain points: Finding and comparing similar products across stores and even within the same company is difficult due to layout and available display.​
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Recommendations: Attach QR codes to furniture items to pull up similar items and their locations on the customer's phone when scanned.
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Limitations
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Interview: Most interviews were conducted in brick-and-mortar stores like IKEA or Target, or with people we know. They may not be representative enough of users who like to do online shopping frequently.
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Due to time constrain, we did not have a chance to testify our recommendations. It would be helpful if we can do additional research on how significantly would they impact the customers' purchasing incentives
My Learnings
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The survey is easy to spread out, but not all answers are accountable.
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Don't be shy to ask for fund support from the sponsors, the reward incentives largely helped me in recruiting participants for both survey and contextual inquiries.