ASOS - Personal Shopper

 

CHALLENGE

As part of my interview for ASOS I was asked to complete a design challenge. The brief was to create a personalised experience for ASOS customers. Focusing on 1 or 2 key areas of the customer journey.

 

Research

As an ASOS ‘power user’ I initially went through one of my usual journeys and captured this in a flow. Although personal, it helped me to start to understand how other users might move through the website/app.

Users

Moving on to user interviews I spoke to multiple users about their online shopping habits with a specific focus on ASOS shopping. Some of the behaviours they discussed were:

  • Loving the ease of shopping online

  • Often shopping on ASOS while watching TV in the evening

  • Favouriting all the things they liked and then narrowing down from there

  • Using the Style Feed for inspiration

Some of the aspects of ASOS that they struggled with were:

  • The huge amount of scrolling

  • There’s so much stuff that it can be overwhelming

  • One user only shopped in the Curve section, using the app which meant they had to scroll each time to find it — “I wish it would remember my preference.”

  • Users never knew when items were back in stock

  • They wanted to be able to group their favourites

  • Didn’t like paying before knowing if an item fits

After speaking to users, I wanted to understand more about the difference of those people shopping online vs. in store. Also, understanding how the vast number of items on ASOS might affect a user’s shopping experience. There were 3 interesting quotes that I pulled out:

  • 39% of store shoppers would be willing to share personal data regarding their preferences with a retailer to receive better services in store.

  • “Brands that nurture a superlative personalised shopping experience, both in-store and online, will harness the ultimate staying power.”

  • “Decision fatigue helps explain why ordinarily sensible people get angry at colleagues and families, splurge on clothes, buy junk food at the supermarket and can’t resist the dealer’s offer to rustproof their new car. No matter how rational and high-minded you try to be, you can’t make decision after decision without paying a biological price. It’s different from ordinary physical fatigue — you’re not consciously aware of being tired — but you’re low on mental energy.”

 

Ideation

Possible ways to build out the personal shopper service.

Moving in to the ideation phase I wanted to focus on creating solutions for the pain points the users I spoke to were experiencing. Some of the ideas that I thought could improve these were:

  • Improved menu and occasions

  • Re-organisation of the favourites section

  • Back in stock alerts

  • Personal shopper experience

Being a challenge I decided to try and create a personal shopper experience. All the users I spoke to mentioned that the number of items that ASOS has on site is overwhelming. Combining this with the articles I read on a user’s willingness to share their data to improve the shopping experience I felt there was a market for a product like this.

 

Solution

To create this product there were a few areas I needed to consider…

User Journey

I started by thinking of a possible user journey through the service and created a flow for it. Going through this process helped me to understand what I might need in terms of information from a user and what data might be required from ASOS.

 

Possible journey through the Personal Shopper experience

 

Data

ASOS already collects a wealth of data on their users. By combining a users personal Saved Items/Your Edit with their Fit Assistant sizing and preferences a stylist would already be able to begin building a picture of a user’s taste.

Combining that with curated content from the ASOS Style Feed, and leveraging the ASOS insiders who have their own category pages a Shopper would have a wealth of information to build from.

 

Wireframes

With the flow and data retrieval understood I was able to start sketching ideas for screens. Over 60% of users (at the time) were using their mobiles to shop so I designed with a mobile-first approach.

 

Prototype

From the wireflow I created low-fidelity wireframes using Sketch which I turned into a clickable prototype on Invision.

I tested this with users who I interviewed during the research stage and also those who had not taken part. This was helpful as I was able to get feedback from someone totally new to the concept and did not know what to expect, as well as those users with some prior understanding.

The key findings were:

  • That users really liked the idea but needed more information at the beginning - maybe a video?

  • Users couldn’t understand why they needed to book an appointment?

  • Avid ASOS users would go straight to search and didn’t look at homepage content

  • Users who are shopping online often don’t want to speak to anyone

  • When they clicked on “book an appointment” it didn’t actually book an appointment as there was another step.

 

Next Steps

This project, being part of an interview process, was completed under tight time constraints. Having more time I would like to:

  • Bring the app up to high fidelity

  • Keep testing with users and iterating

  • Speak to developers about how it could work and if there are any limitations of the technology

  • Work out the pricing — is it free?

Although my initial prototype would have a human as a personal shopper my aim would be to use machine learning, combining all the data, to create an ‘AI’ Stylist.