Mina Awadallah / Projects

Revamping the Search journey for eCommerce with a focus on Interaction

A Design Hackathon explores how a search can be more than typing keywords. It aims to engage users with one-click results, catering to novice and expert users with two approaches to provide user satisfaction and tackle user needs.

Lead product designer

Experiment, Design Hackathon

SEO, Growth, Engineering

Mina Awadallah / Projects

Revamping the Search journey for eCommerce with a focus on Interaction

A Design Hackathon explores how a search can be more than typing keywords. It aims to engage users with one-click results, catering to novice and expert users with two approaches to provide user satisfaction and tackle user needs.

Lead product designer

Experiment, Design Hackathon

SEO, Growth, Engineering

Mina Awadallah / Projects

Revamping the Search journey for eCommerce with a focus on Interaction

A Design Hackathon explores how a search can be more than typing keywords. It aims to engage users with one-click results, catering to novice and expert users with two approaches to provide user satisfaction and tackle user needs.

Lead product designer

Experiment, Design Hackathon

SEO, Growth, Engineering

Intro

Background

I led an innovative design hackathon during my tenure at Ladenzeile.de / Axel Springer. The design team explored new ways, ideas, and solutions to tackle one or more challenges.

The purpose of the design hackathon is to expand our boundaries. try to push the envelope of our existing limitations, Striking a balance between feasible solutions for the present and current platform constrains.

Intro

Goals

Increase User Engagement

Discover new ways to increase user interaction while searching for products and bring more value to our search feature on the home page.


Eliminate Frictions

Eliminate friction for users to reach a partner shop by suggesting products while they are exploring our listings or a journey with a shorter path than the traditional existing one.

Encourage exploration

Encourage users to discover trends in fashion, and explore new listings, especially with each new season of the year.

Increase User Engagement

Discover new ways to increase user interaction while searching for products and bring more value to our search feature on the home page.


Eliminate Frictions

Eliminate friction for users to reach a partner shop by suggesting products while they are exploring our listings or a journey with a shorter path than the traditional existing one.

Encourage exploration

Encourage users to discover trends in fashion, and explore new listings, especially with each new season of the year.

Problem Statement

The existing search functionality has a limited engagement time from users or is rarely used due to the majority of our traffic being directly from Google or other search engines; however, the offering for the search functionality for users has been limited only to keyword suggestions, driven by the goal of retention we wanted to bring a richer value to our search experience on the platform matching user needs while exploring our listings.

Discovery

Features Definition

When catering to expert users, we focus on helping them find matching products to their search criteria. To aid this process, we provide quick filters that allow them to stay on top of the latest trends and fashion seasons. Additionally, we suggest related products based on their specific search terms to further assist them in their search.

Hypothesis

Frictionless entry points (all users)

Effective product discovery is a crucial factor in the success of any eCommerce platform. In fact, users typically evaluate whether their needs are being met within the first few seconds of interacting with the platform. With this in mind, we propose a new approach to help users quickly access different categories of products directly from the search field.

Products suggestion (explorative search)

We wanted to explore an approach that guides users in an explorative search. Users can start by browsing through our entry points, such as "Categories" and "Trends", and we also offer product suggestions. Additionally, users can easily dismiss or add more selections to refine their search.

Contextual filter criteria (expert users)

When catering to expert users, we focus on helping them find matching products to their search criteria. To aid this process, we provide quick filters that allow them to stay on top of the latest trends and fashion seasons. Additionally, we suggest related products based on their specific search terms to further assist them in their search.

Frictionless entry points (all users)

Effective product discovery is a crucial factor in the success of any eCommerce platform. In fact, users typically evaluate whether their needs are being met within the first few seconds of interacting with the platform. With this in mind, we propose a new approach to help users quickly access different categories of products directly from the search field.

Products suggestion (explorative search)

We wanted to explore an approach that guides users in an explorative search. Users can start by browsing through our entry points, such as "Categories" and "Trends", and we also offer product suggestions. Additionally, users can easily dismiss or add more selections to refine their search.

Contextual filter criteria (expert users)

When catering to expert users, we focus on helping them find matching products to their search criteria. To aid this process, we provide quick filters that allow them to stay on top of the latest trends and fashion seasons. Additionally, we suggest related products based on their specific search terms to further assist them in their search.

Design Process

Key activities

Feedback Loops

In the early stage of the project, I went through multiple feedback loops with different teams to better understand the feasibility of the solution such as Supply and demand considering they are the key stakeholders as well as introducing the concept of a white label project to utilize our 15 million product inventory.

A Figma Prototype

Presenting an early Figma prototype steered enough curiosity for the stakeholders, so I developed a basic prototype showing the functionality of one of the touch points to get a buy-in, the engineers took over at a later stage to implement open ai API and test out the search functionality and voice input.

Feedback Loops

In the early stage of the project, I went through multiple feedback loops with different teams to better understand the feasibility of the solution such as Supply and demand considering they are the key stakeholders as well as introducing the concept of a white label project to utilize our 15 million product inventory.

A Figma Prototype

Presenting an early Figma prototype steered enough curiosity for the stakeholders, so I developed a basic prototype showing the functionality of one of the touch points to get a buy-in, the engineers took over at a later stage to implement open ai API and test out the search functionality and voice input.

Feedback Loops

In the early stage of the project, I went through multiple feedback loops with different teams to better understand the feasibility of the solution such as Supply and demand considering they are the key stakeholders as well as introducing the concept of a white label project to utilize our 15 million product inventory.

A Figma Prototype

Presenting an early Figma prototype steered enough curiosity for the stakeholders, so I developed a basic prototype showing the functionality of one of the touch points to get a buy-in, the engineers took over at a later stage to implement open ai API and test out the search functionality and voice input.

Design Process

Results

User experience and planned user testing research

The stakeholders provided positive feedback regarding the proposed solution, but there were concerns regarding user engagement, especially since it was an MVP.


The plan set to test the solution with users to determine whether it was effective in addressing the existing issues with our search field and to explore new ways of searching on our platform.

Explorative Search (Targeting new users)

In this prototype, we hypothesize users start their journey by either writing a keyword in our search field or exploring our categories directly when they begin their search journey. We assumed by reducing the friction to discovering our categories, we provide a quick path for our users to engage and find the products they are looking for.

Let’s talk

Email @ mina@awadallah.io

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