Black Friday Experience
This strategy created by me drives us toward new opportunities during Black Friday 2023. Discover how I optimized Renner's journey with an exclusive end-to-end experience.
Four or more months before Black Friday started, the product team came to me ordering a specific challenge. "We need to change the website background in a tailor-made experience." Suddenly, we came across a black drawing ideated in our minds. But, as a critical professional, I called my Product Design, and we have gotten some ideas to switch a "background black" into new valuable experiences.
Turn back to my last article about the Result List, and you will figure out how we connected both demands using what we already have to accelerate sales during the BF. It's not easy at all, but instead of creating new things, we would like to reduce the impact of developing new things on the code side.
What would we like to reach?
At our own pace, we started to browse the latest trends in and out of the home. We didn't want to rebuild the wheel, but the fact was to change our experience consistently - practical example: a better way to click on the menu tab and find what I need, at the exact time I need it). We intended to collect data information using an accurate approach. All of this we needed to deliver in just one sprint. The time was running!
Problem Statement
While the business team would like to change the website color to black, we were analyzing the user's expectations.
I investigated if just A/B testing was enough to justify the revenue growth at the instant the team wanted to change the website color.
Actually, other variants contributed to increasing the billing in this period. It wasn't the case to explore these reasons, but It was the moment to collect the user perspective.
Strategic Concept
Appropriate moment
Top-mind experience needs to understand "three purchase moments." It starts with a generic search and finishes with a search focused on specific products, brands, and reviews.
Urgence sense
Clients always want their needs fulfilled with products available at the moment of the purchase. The flag "Out of stock" needs to be punctual, and the experience must present similar products or routes.
Clearance products
Black Friday demands looking deeply at the persona called "promohunter." Our attention is turned to this kind of user, thirsty to find good deals. We need to be exclusive, offer free shipping, and accelerate our findability.
Approach
Step 1
Primary Interview
I had a great relationship with the Product Owner, and we treated the demands with ease - it makes a lot of difference in the exact moment of prioritizing one feature over another. Instead of interviewing many targets, we just needed to get a list of the interviewed.
Step 3
Blueprint Customer Mapping
We rebuilt our as-is journey and fulfilled all recommendations on it. Throughout this journey, I defined opportunities connected to the possible actions.
Step 2
Desk Research in and out
Together, we collected information from a wide range of sources. On my side, I created a benchmarking of different players, included Black Friday features in the e-commerce recommendation tool, crafted a giant customer clusterized mapping, and analyzed all the data on it.
Step 4
Prioritizing
This step didn't come up. But, it we created a vast space and opportunity to prioritize some of our recommendations.
The research
1. The benchmarking
Our benchmarking helped us to understand the market pattern (figure 1.0). It's not enough to switch the background to a black design, it's more than that. We needed to justify the importance of keeping the components as they are, without losing our identity. Any radical change could negatively impact our experience. Then, we tried to incorporate the best ideas connected to our business, analyzing the pros and cons (figure 2.0).
2. Qualitative and quantitative data
I was responsible for organizing another step of our desk research. It's crucial to combine data about general consumer behavior at this time of the year and data about the user's expectations. That was why we did it. By analyzing the impact of the main frustration we could prioritize our efforts.
Overall, I clusterized the topics under different categories and tagged them by negative or positive feelings. The result was this giant mapping presented below and some statements of what I figured out:
3. Blueprint Customer Mapping
The clusterization defined the changes that we would make. Due to the failures that we had in our journey and the customer frustration degree, we were looking forward to putting our ideas in a tailor-made blueprint. Our goal was to valorize the homepage and the result list, because all the information that we already had could be adapted very well in these steps. By the way, we crafted the blueprint with the main actions, backstage, front-age, and user view.
Key solution elements
Our research placed us in front of the touchpoints and pain points that we needed to dive deeper into new perspectives. I decided to slip each of them into two complementary parts: evidence and consequence.
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Product Variety
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Promotional factor
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Findability
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Shipping and pick up in-store
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Payment
Example: If my touchpoint is "variety of products", my evidence would be to avoid the lack of stock at the result list, presenting as a consequence just available products in the list.
Business Impact
Reduce the bounce rate in the last step, accelerating the valuable time in our e-commerce, without forgetting the possibility of investing in new deals, quality, and good shipping.