Reimagining the parts & accessories shopping experience
With a catalogue of thousands of different parts and accessories for a multitude of Nissan models and versions, creating a simple and easy to use shopping experience was our top priority. This project refined the existing experience to ensure customers feel confident when browsing and purchasing products.
Context
My role in the team
SimplePart partner with many automotive OEM's to provide a platform and operational service for the parts & accessories e-commerce experience. This means that the designers responsible for the global template, that will be used on all Nissan websites worldwide, work at SimplePart.
My role as UX designer on the project was to represent Nissan to advocate for our users and business objectives to ensure this emanates in the Simplepart design. Since this is a platform that is used by multiple OEM's, we faced several challenges around technical feasibility, time vs effort and conflicting business interests. As well as bringing my expertise as a designer to the table, my skills in articulating decisions with conviction, prioritising requirements and maintaining positive client relationships were essential for this project.
The Brief
The projects goal was to Leverage existing platform investments to deliver a hybrid, technical solution for Nissan's Parts & Accessories platform, prioritising customer experience without sacrificing business needs.
Current Design
Design approach
The process of enhancing the experience
Firstly, we assessed the existing website and identified key areas that needed improvement, and also prioritised these based on severity of impact on user experience. This exercise formed the basis of the recommendations we provided for the SimplePart designers and guided the changes that needed to be made.
Conduct competitor analysis and audit existing site
Analysing best-in-class e-commerce experiences helped us to identify areas of concern and opportunity with our existing user journeys. This was communicated to the client in the form of workshops and PDF reports to use for reference.
Make recommendations to improve current experience
Recommendations were made on how to improve several aspects of the experience to address user pain points.
Oversee design process and sign off final designs
The design process included many push-backs and compromises in order to find the best solution that meets user needs, but also goals of both businesses.
Competitor analysis
We studied 11 competitors
Journey mapping
Identifying customer needs and areas of opportunity
We create 3 journey maps to visualise the steps that our customers take to purchase Nissan parts or accessories for their vehicles. This allowed us to take a deeper look into our customer's needs and identify challenges we need to solve and new opportunities for design.
Opportunities
We made design recommendations based on the insights gathered from research
Pain Point
In order to see more about the item, the user has to click on the part number, which isn't in line with with expectations.
Opportunity
Make the call to action clearer and easier to scan so that users can make decisions quickly and with less cognitive strain.
Pain Point
It's difficult to distinguish between the different elements in the header, adding to the user's cognitive load when they try to scan for a particular function.
Opportunity
Enhance the header to make elements more visually distinct and easy to understand, whilst still maintaining functionality.
Final Design
An improved user experience
Project Highlights
Improvements based on our recommendations
Meaningful calls to action
On the live site, the 'featured products' cards were outdated and not very easy to understand. One of our greatest concerns was using the part number as the call to action label, a decision made my SimplePart to boost SEO, but poses several experience and accessibility problems.
After a lot of discussion on the matter, the Nissan team were able to successfully convince SimplePart (most importantly, the CEO) to put experience at the heart of the product. My role on this journey was to provide evidence and justification for more meaningful call-to-actions, and do so with conviction in high-pressure meetings.
Recognition rather than recall
Users shouldn't have to rely on their memory when completing tasks using web interfaces, as this could add to cognitive load and creates greater chances of error.
In the example below, the first WIP design for changing your dealer from one to another was purely a notice to confirm the change. Adding dynamic text here to replay the new dealer to the user before making the selection, and highlight other important information that may impact their decision means the user is completely informed and therefore in control. This helps to minimise error and reduce task time.
Optimised header
A requirement for the new technical design was to implement a Nissan Global header along with the SimplePart e-commerce platform header, evidencing benefit for both business cases.
A stacked header with additional functionality enables users to easily access frequently-used pages on the website. Going with a more compact design does not distract from the primary browsing experience, but is still visible to the user.
Frictionless vehicle selection
The vehicle selector in the live site is clunky and requires the user to make 4 different selections, refreshing the page each time. Further, there was no option to backtrack to adjust previous selections or easily change the vehicle once it had been selected.
Simplifying this experience by providing dynamic drop-downs allows the user to provide the same information but with a lot less friction. A cleaner interface also speeds up the process as the user is familiar with the design pattern after completing the first field. Displaying a second option to type in their VIN (registration plate) gives the user freedom of choice, which in this case reduces the number of steps needed to achieve the same outcome.
Accessibility guidance for developers
In some cases, our design suggestions were not able to be implemented due to the rigidity of the SimplePart platform. Focus order in the example below was a key concern, as the screenreader doesn't currently provide any context when focused on the 'select' button.
By providing accessibility documentation for components that need additional consideration, we can ensure that users with additional needs can still experience the website in a meaningful way.
