HEMA is a Dutch retail chain known for offering a wide range of affordable and practical products.
Context
Google approached Accenture to support Hema with
Optimising Navigation
Help Hema to explore alternative navigation based on modern shopper’s mindsets and way of buying. We agreed to focus on testing the new released navigation and exploring alternative navigations. Finding a balance between SEO and UX
Project duration: 4 weeks
Note! All the rights are reserved to Accenture Song, Google and Hema. The work was done my be as I worked at Accenture Song.
My role & responsibilities
- Lead the Design Stream of work
- Guide the junior researchers
- Oversee the delivery and quality of the project
- Guide the team with the prior experience of Information Architecture, prototyping and testing
Kick-off & Project Goals
It’s critical to have aproper kick-off for each project, to establish understanding, timelines, expectations of each and everyone. as well as define roles and responsibilities.
Research and understanding of the current situation
Desk research and findings
Visits With and Without use of navigation
Conversion rate and avg. odervalue are significantly higher for visits with the usage of navigation in comparison to visits without the use of navigation. The revenue and transaction distribution also shows a higher weighted share relative to the number of sessions for visits with the use of navigation. Average amount of pages per sessions and the average sessions duration are significantly higher for visits with the usage of navigation in comparison to visits without the use of navigation. A significantly lower bounce rate and Exit-rate are found for visits with the use of navigation in comparison to visits without navigation.
Usage of different navigations
Desktop: Users within desktop predominantly use the submenu displayed directly on the page. However, underlying pages do not show all subcategories under this category as shown in the hamburger menu.
Mobile: Users on mobile show a relatively equal use of navigation. Though the hamburger menu is used more frequently.
Hierarchy and popularity of categories
Current hierarchy shown on the website is not equal to popularity (based on CTR). Also the devices mobile and desktop show different behaviour.
Overlap of categories
Several categories overlap (e.g. users who see "kind" often also see "baby"). This shows that combining these categories would not impact findability of products. It could even increase average item quantity as users will be shown products they want/need without needing to navigate to another section.
Usage mobile levels (only browser, NOT APP)
Within the mobile menu a big drop-off can been seen after level 1. This means that people click on a category however they do not continue to the next click in the subcategory.
Approach to the testing
Qualitative testing through Maze
Learnings & insights
Merge related categories
Decrease the size of categories to display more and remove friction
Group related items into clear sub-categories
Add icons to the list of sub-subcategories
Run ongoing small tests
The team structure
1 junior researcher
1 junior Data analist
Stakeholders
Design Lead
The real challenges and learnings ;)
Hema is a big organisation and a lot of decisions need to go through a lot of sign-offs
It's possible to test, validate and learn things by testing, however to get real results a real A/B was required.
A lot of different factors influece how buyers search for things.
We understood that no matter how you cateforise the information architecture, in commerce website, 9 out of 10 people will use the search rather than the menu
Research from NN group
Research from …