Asos - Research Hub

 

THE CHALLENGE

At ASOS, a lot of research was carried out across the fields of UX, analytics, data science and brand for there own purposes, but often this work was useful across multiple teams. The problem they had was that there was no centralised place that it was stored. This led to work being repeated, and there was an inability to build on and track past research. If ASOSers wanted to find out what had been done before they would need to email and message each other, which wasted time. Worst of all, there had been cases of people leaving the company with knowledge stored in their head or lost on the server somewhere.

To combat this, the UX team had started using Airtable to log research we were carrying out across the digital experience team. Although this was a great way to store research, it was a spreadsheet that members across Tech were reluctant to use.

I was tasked by the UX Lead to create a product which we could plug our Airtable spreadsheet into so that more ASOSers would start using it.

 
 

THE PROCESS

I carried out initial research to get an understanding of how ASOSers were logging and sharing research and where the current pain points were.

After this first round of interviews, I presented the insights I gathered and held a sketching workshop with members of the UX/UI team. This workshop brought out lots of ideas that I was able to transfer into a low-fidelity digital prototype on Sketch, which I then tested with a couple of the users I interviewed. 

After a couple of user tests, it was clear that there were too many features in the prototype which led to users being a little overwhelmed and confused during the testing. After a discussion with key stakeholders and another round of user interviews, I narrowed the focus for an MVP version.

The key areas I focused on for this were:

  • Making search more prominent on the home page

  • Having an easy to digest and uniform way of presenting data

  • Listing the key contacts in case follow-up was needed

  • Showing user profile and demographic

With a better understanding of the problem, I was able to create another prototype using elements from the ASOS design system. I had initially wanted to create a very colourful product to make it more enticing for people to use. However, after conversations with the Brand department, we decided that internal tools should match the look and feel of our customer-facing products.

After creating a new prototype, I was able to test again. For this round of user testing, I had 5 participants. You can read the full results at the following link.

UX research project template

 

Next Steps

The project was stopped at this point due to budget constraints on internal projects. If I had been able to continue with this work, my next steps would have been to:

  • Create the next iteration of the prototype based on the feedback I received in the last round of user testing.

  • Bring up the fidelity of the UI and test again.

  • Work with an Engineer to see if there were any components we currently have that we could reuse and adapt.