Understanding consumers’ online shopping behaviors for clothing in the retail industry
Online shopping happens frequently, but do people ever notice how they shop online? Customers’ online shopping behaviors have been largely influenced by the way the retailers present options and the tools offered by them, as well as how platforms collect and protect data coming from the customers. In this project, using various research methods, we want to explore what customers’ general strategies are as they approach their target product using tools such as navigation bars, filters, and search engines when shopping online, as well as how fast modern retailers can improve personalization while maintaining data privacy.
Duration
May 2023 - Aug 2023
Research Type
Explorative Research
My Role
Leading UX Researcher
Context & Research Focus
Our Research Question:
How could retailers improve and create tools to provide personalization while maintaining customer data privacy?
Research Background
Retail and Service industry companies are under increased pressure to deliver more personalized, convenient, and value-priced products and services to consumers while ensuring positive impacts on global challenges such as sustainability, data privacy/security, and social and economic equity. How might these companies continue delivering high-quality consumer experiences while safeguarding people and the planet?
Aspiring UXR
.png)
Exploring UX/UI
.png)
ML research&UI
.png)
Info security
UX Design
Approach & Process
Learning Context: dive into the research space
To explore a potential research focus, we generated 15 questions related to our project direction and investigated the content of 10 relevant research papers. Based on the findings, we decided our project direction: Modern fast fashion retail company, data privacy, young adults.
Since we wanted to further get a sense of how people shop online and their attitude towards data privacy, we conducted observational and experiential research with people around us and ourselves on the topic of online shopping behaviors and data privacy.
Contextual Interview: observing and learning people’s thoughts & behaviors
From our observational and experiential research, we learned interesting comments about how consumers use various tools, and thus we wanted to further understand how people shop online using the current tools on the retailers’ websites and tried to gain insights into how people think about shopping online.
Q: How do people use current tools such as search, navigation bar, filter, and recommendations to find the targets?
We interviewed 10 participants about 1) demonstration of how they use tools to find targets (contextual inquiry), views about tools, and general shopping behaviors.
.svg)
Synthesizing Results: what did we learn?
Overall, we found some interesting insights:
- Customers face several challenges when they are shopping online, such as keeping personal privacy, too much options, and not being able to try on clothes
- Online shopping experience is very different from in-store shopping, both mentally and physically. When shopping online, people are presented with a huge amount of options and information, and they had to rely on other sources to determine if the products they’ve chosen fit
- Consumers rely on their past experiences when shopping online - consistent web design, previous purchases.
We further created customer journey map for two types of personas to demonstrate their preferences in tools and shopping styles.
Idea Proposal & Testing: what could be a future solution?
Based on the two main questions, after rounds of crazy 8 and storyboards discussions, we proposed an idea to address:
- people’s concern towards giving their data to the websites
- creating a more natural shopping experience by personalizing choices based on people’s daily style
We then created our first draft for the idea below.
To test our idea, we conducted 5 idea testings with our first version on the topic of 1) whether they trust the platform more regarding data privacy 2) how they feel about each feature From the idea testing, we learned three important feedback:
Final Solution
Future Direction of Our Research
Business Value
- A solution for data privacy, personalization, and sustainability.
- Partnering with companies to provide service
- It’s more than a closet: it’s a new way of shopping!
Future Work in the Retailers’ Industry
- With the increasing reliance on technology and data in the retail industry, data privacy and security will continue to be critical concerns for fast fashion companies.
- With the development of AR/VR/MR technology and the powerful generative AI with better analysis ability, the way people shop online is going to be more digitized while natural.
Reflection
be comfortable with changes
As the leading researcher in the team, I started with making detailed plans about what everyone should do and what was expected at a certain time, but as we move forward, there were a lot of unexpected incidents. For instance, we originally planned to use a week for user interviews, but we found out that a week was not enough for the quality of our insights. To deal with this issue, I adjusted the following plans and made sure that we could do more research but finish the tasks in time so that we wouldn’t have to drag a lot. The key here for me was to stick with my plan while trying to be more comfortable with all the possible changes.
Being open in the early stage
After conducting third-party research, we decided to focus on data privacy and fast fashion modern companies in the retail industry, but struggled to find a specific question. Our team explored different approaches in observational and experiential research and found that exploring tools, such as navigation or filters, was more engaging. This shift led to a challenge in connecting our findings back to data privacy and taught us the importance of being open during early research stages. We learned that changing topics is not uncommon but being clear on key questions and sticking with them is crucial.
Other Projects
%201.svg)
.svg)
