My Collections
Product Case Study
Elevating the E-Commerce Shopping Experience through new Rating & Review features.
By Shimona De Souza (Product Manager)
Problem Overview
Problem Context
LCBO offers customers a vast variety of products to choose from. While this extensive selection can be beneficial for customers to find products that cater to their desired, sometimes niche, tastes and preferences, it may also make it difficult for them to keep track of which items they’ve purchased previously and what they would like to re-buy. Customers would need to memorise, click images to save to their galleries or write down these items in their notes app, which is inconvenient, tedious and time-consuming.
Problem Statement
How can LCBO facilitate customers to remember which items they’ve liked or disliked in the past and motivate them to try new products?
Background Research and LCBO Statistics
In order to understand the extent of this problem and how it affects the retail industry at large, we conducted research into how often customers leverage ratings and reviews as well how they do their shopping.
In addition, we got some relevant data from the LCBO Online Analytics and Reporting team which further substantiated that this was a problem space worth exploring and solutioning.
Product Validation
To validate the need for a solution to this problem with real users, an anonymous survey was created and sent out to Communitech employees to gain a deeper understanding into whether customers prefer shopping online or in-store, whether they have LCBO accounts, how often they try new products, whether ratings and reviews impact their purchasing decisions and whether they keep track of which items they’ve purchased previously. To fortify our findings and increase our awareness of user pain points and needs, we also conducted user interviews with four Commmunitech employees where we gained in-depth insight into how customers currently shop for alcohol products and what they find lacking in the existing system.
User Interviews and Survey Key Takeaways
The observations we made from the user interviews and survey results helped us determine which problem areas needed to be focused on and improved.
The user interviews we conducted spotlighted that:
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Customers find ratings and reviews valuable to read before purchasing.
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They usually tend to read reviews much more often than they write them.
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They prefer to have the choice to keep private some of the reviews they write.
The survey results indicated that:
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A majority of respondents like trying new LCBO products once a month or every couple of months.
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Almost all wish that there was a way to keep track of products they like in stores.
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Most would use a feature that allowed them to keep a history of their own ratings and reviews, and believe that it would definitely improve the overall shopping experience.
Solution Overview
Say Hello to “My Collections” by LCBO!
This e-commerce feature enables LCBO online account holders to add items to their personal, custom collections, rate and review items as well as keep track of what they’ve liked or disliked previously.
Deliverable
New feature on the LCBO website
Duration
2 months:
October - November 2022
Team & Roles
Shimona De Souza, Product Manager
Elle Luo, UX Designer
Tristan Parry, Full Stack Developer
Richard Xu, Full Stack Developer
Scope
Competitive Market Space
We reviewed the current market landscape to learn more about existing products and their successes which helped define and shape the features our team decided to pursue. Some prominent inspirations were Goodreads, Instagram, Pinterest and Youtube.
Requirements and Features
We determined the chief features to be prioritised in order to address the main problems identified based on the user interviews and survey results:
My Ratings and Reviews at a Glance
Customers can view all the ratings and reviews they’ve left for products in a tabular format.
Public or Private Reviews
Customers can choose between writing personal notes or public reviews and toggle accordingly.
Customised Collections
Customers can add items to custom collections they create.
Goals
Optimised History Tracking
Customers will be able to easily track which items they’ve purchased in the past, whether they’ve liked or disliked them based on the ratings and reviews they’ve given and can use this information when making re-purchasing decisions.
Better Organised Product Lists
Customers will be able to create personal, customised collections and add items to them, which will lead to better organisation of products, more time saved when shopping due to a simpler lookup method and more convenient recommendation or shopping lists to share with friends and family.
Improved Customer Experience
Providing these new features will increase convenience for customers, reduce the need to note down or memorise products they’ve tried or want to try and improve the overall shopping experience while boosting customer engagement with the LCBO website.
Projected Business Value
More LCBO Accounts
More customers will be motivated to create LCBO online accounts to be able to use this feature of ‘My Collections’.
Greater Brand Trustworthiness
Customers will be encouraged to write and share reviews publicly if they get a personal benefit from it and this will lead to greater brand trustworthiness for LCBO.
Increased New Products Purchased
Customers will be more likely to try new products if there are substantial ratings and reviews available to reference before making purchases and this will lead to increased revenue from additional sales for LCBO.
Improved Understanding of Consumer Preferences
LCBO will understand customer preferences better and can provide targeted advertising and tailored recommendations to personal likes and dislikes.
Detailed Solution
Since this proposed idea would be integrated into the LCBO website, the first consideration we had to take into account during the design process was that the current e-commerce website is built using the Magento platform and so, our designs had to match similar aesthetics and functionality to make development work easier. The second consideration was that we wanted to leverage existing components from the “Favourite Products” option such as ‘Share Products’, ‘Add to Cart’ and ‘Add All to Cart’ in order to maintain consistency.
Creating a user flow diagram helped us determine the steps involved and ensured that the key requirements were being met, as can be seen below:
Prototype - Desktop View
My Collections Page:
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Two default collections - “Tried” and “Want to Try”
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Create, edit or delete personal, custom collections
Specific Collection Page:
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Add or delete items to/from collection
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View items in two formats - List view and Dashboard view
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Sort items by Date Added, Price, My Rating and A-Z
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Ratings are always public
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Reviews can be selected to be public or private for each individual item
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Click on ‘Write a Review’ to add review
Review Pop-up Page:
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Toggle button to choose between saving privately or sharing publicly
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Mandatory fields differ depending on private or public
Product Result Page:
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Click bookmark icon to save to specific collection
Prototype - Mobile View
Specific Collection Page:
My Collections Page:
Review Pop-up Page:
Product Result Page:
Usability Testing and Iteration
During the design stage, multiple internal design reviews were held within our team. We followed a cycle of continuous improvement and iterative design based on the feedback we got from our team members and worked closely with the Developers to ensure that the designs were feasible and development-friendly. Furthermore, this process was fortified by conducting usability testing of our prototype with four Communitech employees. These interviews allowed us to determine the user-friendliness and learnability of our proposed designs and make refinements as needed.
Key Takeaways
This project provided multiple learning opportunities where I was able to hone a variety of my product management skills.
I led market landscape analysis, conducted customer interviews, defined and shaped feature requirements and specs, composed PRDs (product requirement documents), built user journeys and personas, collaborated with the designer and developers, and ran usability testing. Furthermore, I strengthened my knowledge about establishing product scope, prioritising key features and pitching products to external stakeholders. All in all, it was an extremely enriching experience which reinforced my passion as a Product Manager!