Complete UX/UI design audit for an online nail polish store

Live Love Polish thought their customers might feel that their online store was difficult to use.

They hoped improvements to customers’ site experience could also help increase average order value (how much a customer spends per purchase, on average) and conversion rate (percentage of customers that end up making a purchase).

I was brought on to conduct a complete UX/UI audit of Live Love Polish’s website.

I surveyed 5,041 Live Love Polish visitors and interviewed 12 of them, to learn customers’ behaviors on the site, how they decide to make a purchase, and pain points they’ve experienced:

4 interviewees said they looked for nail polishes by color and type.

Live Love Polish didn’t have a filter feature the way competitors like Sephora, ULTA, and OPI did.

4 interviewees said they add any polish that catches their eye into their cart, then weed the cart down to the polishes they intend to purchase.

Only 1 intervieewee said she uses the Wish List system, while the others described it as “buggy.” Instead, customers used the cart to save polishes they like, including the ones they don’t end up buying.

“I could get more stuff, if my stuff would save.”

3 interviewees have had items added to their cart deleted after a few days. Unlike eBay, a website that surveyed customers identified as one of their favorites to shop from, the cart did not communicate that items added to it were not actually saved long term.

It was clear that introducing color and finish filters, and revamping the Wish List system could improve customers’ shopping experience.

Live Love Polish would also not miss out on future purchase opportunities if customers did not delete polishes they liked but didn’t intend to buy at that moment, if they saved those polishes into a reliable Wish List.

I mapped out what a customers’ journey on the website could look like, identifying where they could use the filters and wish list system.

I facilitated a Design Studio workshop with stakeholders where we sketched ideas.

Some of their sketches provided inspiration for Color and Finish filters.

Others included ideas for a more prominent Wish List system.

I then consolidated our ideas and mocked them into wireframes:

Color / Finish Filters

Category pages now featured a toolbar with color and finish filters.

Customers could click on Color or Finish to view different options to filter nail polishes by.

Adding to Wish List on category pages

Customers could now add nail polishes to their Wish Lists from any category page by clicking on the hearts located at the top right corner of a nail polish.

Adding to Wish List on cart page

The cart page now prompts customers when they weren’t signed in. Signing in now gave customers the ability to save items to their Wish List from the cart page, showed them what items were currently in their Wish List, and the ability to add to cart from the Wish List.

What I Learned

One-on-one usability testing showed customers successfully using the new color and finish filters, and adding polishes to the revamped Wish List. We also A:B tested these features on the live website, and data from Google Analytics showed that the Wish List was being used.

Heatmaps from live A:B testing showed the filters were being used

Desktop heatmap from live A:B test

Determining if either feature impacted the average order value or conversion rate was challenging.

To make this call, our test would need to have achieved statistical significance. To achieve that, we would need to run our test on a lot of users, and reaching that number would take a long time.

The benefits of maintaining such a live, controlled experiment for this one feature weren’t as great as the required investment in time. Learning this helped us manage expectations for our future projects.