One Westwing
The goal of this project was to merge the two business models, Westwing and Westwingnow into one seamless shopping experience
“I find it a bit irritating… I don’t understand the difference. It would be nice if I got some sort of explanation…”
— Westwing user since 2 years
Onboarding
In order to properly explain the merge to the users, contextual onboarding became a key part of the project. On web we resorted to hotspot and subtle animations, the app, however, was different.
In apps the change for the user was more drastic, as we were completely killing one of the apps, and pushing all our users to the other one. A proper app onboarding became key. Several rounds of testing were necessary to find the balance between what the user would read, what would catch their attention, and what exactly they needed to know.
Finally we ended with a very inspirational segmented onboarding, where we first determined what kind of user was opening the app (old user, familiar with one business model but not the other, power user…) and then showed them only the screens that were relevant to them.
Navigation
Once the user was familiar with the concept, ensuring a seamless navigation between both business models was the next priority.
Drawing inspiration from e-commerces that had a division between a women, men and kids section, we designed and tested three different versions to see which one our users could understand better. The tabs in the header ended up being the most self-explanatory option for the majority of users, but it came with its challenges too: Due to the difference in features available for each business model, this version required a dynamic tab-bar, which is something very unusual in apps, and a big no-no when it comes to UX best practices.
So what did we do? We put done before perfect. We understood that solving the pain-point of the business model separation was highly valuable for our users, and it was worth it to release an MVP with some flaws like this one, for the time being. We designed an animation to help draw the user’s attention to the tab-bar change, and will continue to improve the app navigation moving forward.
The Cart Challenge
Until this point, users had to buy things from westing.de and westwingnow.de in two different carts. This project was something that lots of them had been wishing for for a long time, but it came with some difficulties.
1. Differences between business models
As with the navigation project, the differences in business models (that were too complex to tackle before the MVP) became visible in the merged cart. Some products had an add to wishlist, some were reserved once placed in the cart, and they all were trying to communicate different levels of urgency.
2. Different preferences between shop & Club users
Even if some of said differences could have been unified, we had two different pools of users that we were trying to please. Loyal Westwing and Westwingnow customers that had become used to said features, and that had quite contradicting preferences.
3. Lack of benchmarks
Benchmarking thoroughly was always a big part of the process in the Westwing design team, but with this project, there was simply no example of businesses in this unique situation. So what we lacked in benchmarks, we needed to make up for with User Research.
The research
The research consisted of usability tests with 12 different users where we analysed how much they understood, how well they used the prototypes, and what they felt about certain features.
Surprisingly we found that users understood much better than we had anticipated. They didn’t need big indications like headlines or sections about where each item came from, a simple icon or a small animation was enough to catch their attention. Overall, the delight of having all products in the same cart outweighed those small issues we had been worrying about.
The Layout
So we went with a simple layout, heavily based on the previous cart designs from Westwingnow, with small additions, like an informative banner and a yellow clock icon for the products that were reserved.
At points where we identified during testing that the users needed a bit of extra help we included overlays with catchy headlines and further color assosiation.
“I really like that now I can shop from both places at once. It makes my life easier.”
— Westwing User