Increasing feature usage and customer sign ups by more than threefold

By upgrading bookmarking functionality

UX Design

Responsive Web

Final Screen for Academy Business Case (Ammuniton Page) second image with active button

Summary

Improve web feature utilization, drive customer sign ups, and increase engagement

Responsibilities

Lead competitor analysis
User research
Product Strategy
Design user experience
Design high fidelity prototype

Problem: Academy had a wishlist functionality that did not met the needs of the users and therefore was underutilized

Current experience did not provide an intuitive experience to “like” or “favorite” products
Common UX guidelines favor use of wishlists early on the journey, not in cart as it was currently used

Legacy "wishlist" functionality buried within cart after users proceeded to add items

Usage metrics for "wishlist" feature during 2022

7,700 sessions added items
to wishlist

8% account
Sign Ups

I studied 5 key retailers that offered a similar functionality and honed-in the best two experiences

Competitor 1 Strengths & Weaknesses

Enables “Add to List” on Product Details pages and Product Listing Pages
CTA is visible within the image thumbnail
Guest users can “like” items
Default list is created on users behalf
No visual cue to where items are saved or how to reach the favorites list

Competitor 2 Strengths & Weaknesses

Prompts user with a small dialog box to drive to the favorites list
Offers wishlist functionality on both product listing pages and product detail pages
Allows sharing through link
Defaults to only one system-generated list
Requires sign in to “favorite”
No way to add more lists

I planned 5 in-person interviews to understand the opportunity and challenges that customers face (or didn’t) when bookmarking items to view/shop later

I defined the survey questions to screen for shoppers that would find a favorite feature most useful and gather insights on common behavior among them

Sample Questions

How often do you visit Academy.com? How often do you have the need to save something?
Walk us through your process on how to save items to see later
How do you compare items?
Are you familiar with the wishlist functionality?
What makes you buy something in-store vs on the web?

When designing the experience there were a few challenges that I had to solve with the help of PDMs, BA’s and leadership. The following are the most critical ones:

Reuse or create new functionality?

Naming the system-generated list so that it would not create duplicates from existing, user-generated lists

Driving the user to see their “favorites” list with as little friction as possible or cluttering the experience

Uncovered new functionality during usability testing

Product team wanted to open it up to all users, executive leadership wanted to lock it down for signed in users

Building on top of existing functionality or build a new functionality

The website already had a “wishlists” feature.
So for this new feature, upon “liking” an item experience, we should:
‍A) open up a dialog with a view of existing lists?
or
B) Add the item to a system-generated list?

First step on exploration design for favorites feature, no heart selected

Data supports starting anew and create a default, system-generated list

Only about 2% of registered users had “wishlists” created in their accounts
Of those 2% of users, the average user had two different sets of “wishlists”

Based on this, the team felt safe to proceed with creating an entire new experience and creating a new system-generated list where “liked” items will be stored

Naming the system-generated list so that it would not create duplicates from existing lists

Naming the "favorites" list with a custom heart icon to avoid duplicates from existing lists

One additional challenge with this option was naming the system-generated list and made sure it didn’t create a conflict with existing user-generated lists.‍We opted to name our system-generated list:
‍
“♡ Favorites” because the use of an icon was not supported in the naming lists field for users.

This assured that we were not going to cause any conflict with existing users

I ran a usability study to determine whether users needed a visual indicator to find their items later on

I prepared two prototypes:
One displaying a toast message upon clicking on the heart
Another one displaying a toast message AND a icon indicator on my account

Usability tests with two screenshots that were used for the A/B test

The majority of the users preferred the toast message AND the counter indicator on header

During the usability test we also found that a lot of users would navigate to the hamburger menu to search for favorites

This was a great finding because it allowed us to “double expose” the link to favorites in two different places in the journey.

Additionally, this meant we could keep the red heart icon indicator because it no longer directly competed with the cart icon.

Finding different places on the site to double expose the favorites link

Product team wanted to open the feature up to all users, executive leadership wanted to lock it down for signed in users

• The team wanted to open up this to all users regardless of status (guest vs signed in)
• However, leadership saw this as a missed opportunity to increase signups by not requiring it
• In the end, the team abided by leadership’s ask
• But allowed a small % of guest users to interact with the feature in order to build data that tests our hypothesis