Hirestreet wanted to find ways to optimise our site to increase there conversion rate to help our overall business goal of increasing our profits for 2022

But where to begin? Our site is large with a lot of pages and we had a limited amount of time to make improvements. To make the most impact to the conversion with our time we looked to Google Analytics to get a better understanding of where users were having issues with our site.

Digging into analytics showed that the majority of our users were exiting our site at the product page. If we could solve this one problem, we thought we could have a big impact on conversion.

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User Research

‍We knew where our site causing problems, but why? What specifically was the issue at the product page that encouraged most people to leave?

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To find out this answer we turned to user research. Using an old survey I was able to reach out to our users and (with the help of a gift card) recruit them to take part in a usability test.

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The test plan focused on the product page but let the user walkthrough the whole site in their own time. By asking them to ‘think out loud’ and describe why they were doing what they were doing, we got great insight into why our users make certain decisions. We took notes as a team and created an affinity map with our results to get an understanding of the reoccurring patterns that happened across all of the interviews.

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The key insights that kept appearing were:

• Customer / Real Life product photos we’re much more appealing to users. They allowed them to get a better understanding of how an outfit might fit them

• Our filters are hard to use and a lot of users couldn’t find the type of filter they were looking for, even though they we’re on our website.

• Reviews were they second biggest influencer on a users decision to checkout. We didn’t have many reviews on the site and users we’re less likely to add those items to their bag

• The wording ‘Rental Fee’ confused our users as it referred to the delivery cost.

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When redesigning the filters I looked to reduce the choices the user has to make at once by showing one single ‘Filter’ button and another ‘Sort by’ button. The old design showed the top 5 filters all and once and had an ‘Advanced filters’ text link to show the rest. During interviews we found a lot of users would miss this text link and so miss the rest of the filters. By putting all the filters into one menu (accessed by the new Filter button), it meant that to users had to think less to find all the filters.

Simplifying the filters like this also meant we can stick the new button to the top of the browser. The filters could now follow the user down the page as they browse through the products. Allowing users to narrow their search whenever they want to.

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We also updated the product carousel to show the models size and introduced a sticky add to bag button to the product page (Hotjar showed only 25% of users would scroll down to find the ‘Add to bag’ button)

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After implementing these changes to our product and search pages we saw an increase in our conversion rate from 0.8% to 1.4%. This increase in conversion was a great sign that the changes made by the whole business have successfully helped our make the experience of browsing and navigation our site a much more pleasurable one!

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