E-commerce merchants are consistently trying to enhance conversion rates for their e-commerce businesses to increase their revenues and generate more profits.
PROJECT TYPE
Virtual Shopping App
PROJECT DURATION
1 year
ROLE
Product Designer
TOOLS
Figma / Maze.co
Challenge
E-commerce merchants are consistently trying to enhance conversion rates for their e-commerce businesses to increase their revenues and generate more profits. Merchants often feel helpless - have no active control in online selling compared to in-person.
Solution
Shop Studio Live is a former Shopify dedicated app which allows Shopify merchants to overlay a live shopping experience within their online store. This allows them to connect directly with their audience, feature products live, and generate more revenue.
What is Virtual Live Shoppping?
Think of the Home Shopping Network or the Shopping Channel for us Canadians, but swap out TVs for mobile devices. The core idea is that brands feature their products via a livestream in order to engage with their audience. If you’ve ever purchased anything on Instagram Live or Amazon Live, it’s the same principle.
Shop Studio Live was created to provide this functionality to Shopify online stores. Merchants could download our app, and within minutes were able to host online shopping experiences via a livestream.
My Role
The Shop Studio Live team consisted of 6 people which included a product owner, project manager, marketing coordinator, 2 developers, and myself the product designer.
I joined the Shop Studio Live team a few months after its initial launch and took over as its sole product designer. I was responsible for recommending and designing new features, auditing my predecessor’s work, and conducting quantitative (via Maze.co) to identify opportunities for improvement.
Shop Studio Live was almost designed entirely using Polaris, Shopify’s primary design system for merchant apps. Due to this, Shop Studio Live’s UI had not changed in the time that I was involved with this project.
Design Features
Working closely with the Shop Studio Live team through a series of design sprints, I took the lead in designing the following features.
Improving the Event Creation Flow for Shopify Merchants
Before Shopify merchants were able to host live events on their online store, they needed to create their event first. This was handled by our Create Event flow. Earlier iterations of this flow were clunky, had large amounts of unhelpful text, and high rates of user drop-off.
After conducting quantitative testing to identify weaknesses in the previous flow, I was able to build the newer iteration, shown below, which provided a more streamlined experience.
Redesigning the Control Room
Our earlier iterations of Shop Studio Live required that merchants install a third party app before they could stream online. This was communicated to merchants during the standard event flow. User testing showed that this was a major drop-off point for many new users due to how technical this step was.
The primary roadblock was that users were instructed to download and learn a third party app on their mobile device before they could proceed. We learned that many users gave up in frustration.
For our solution, we eventually moved away from requiring users to download a third party app, and simplified the experience overall. Users now only needed to scan a QR code and validate it with a pin before they could begin streaming.
Expanded Product Descriptions for Shoppers
We created Shop Studio Live to be used by merchants to connect with their customers, so naturally we wanted to create a great experience for the latter too.
Initially, shoppers could browse through a list of products on the Shop Studio Live app, but had to navigate away from the livestream to a separate product page to view more information about a specific item.
To keep more shoppers engaged with the livestream, I created an expanded product description for shoppers. Customers could now see the different sizes, colours, and other variants of an item, all while allowing them to remain engaged with the merchant.
Download Livestream Videos
Takeaways
E-commerce merchants are consistently trying to enhance conversion rates for their e-commerce businesses to increase their revenues and generate more profits. Merchants often feel helpless - have no active control in online selling compared to in-person.