Overhauling our navigation structure across the site was a study in rethinking our UX weaknesses. Establishing best practices for an easier iteration process, implementing styles, and creating component pieces also helped shape a holistic design framework.
Understanding the best experience to improve performance at one of the most important phases of the conversion funnel was crucial when improving checkout. Refining the checkout process to solve for high abandonment and customer service complaints of usability issues was a great discovery moment.
Increase number of items per order.
Decrease checkout abandonment.
Make mobile-friendly.
Clarify payment options available.
Increase AOV with more prominent messaging and features around shipping, promotions, and upsell.
Users were unable to find the promo code.
Confusion about the "Continue" and "Place My Order" buttons created hesitancy for ordering with many users.
No error messaging for form fields.
Payment methods were not clearly shown.
Non-responsive.
Shipping messaging was unclear.
The biggest change made in the new UI was separating the cart itemization point of friction from the point where users input required information. This made sure the user could focus on the most important decision moments based on where they were in the conversion funnel.
Previously users had to conduct all of the following actions on one page:
• Add and remove items from their cart
• Add shipping information
• Find and apply a promo code
• Search for and choose a payment method
• Input payment information
• Make the final decision to place an order
With each of these choices given equal presence, it was an overwhelming task and thus the "place order" button carried a lot of weight behind it.
Showing results for new user sessions on desktop-only across both paid and organic traffic.
Creating a personalized shopping experience for thredUP shoppers was a unique task, that proved extremely worthwhile for both users and the company. Allowing shoppers to engage and discover product site wide in an organic fashion produced benefits across every section of the business from marketing to distribution.
A personalization feature for customers within the existing size filter. Saved sizes allowed for users to easily apply their size preferences for quicker navigation throughout the site, leading them to the best product applicable for them.
Over 73% of users searched by specific brands when shopping on thredUP, so allowing the filter for brands to stay on, provided a lot of convenience for repeat users. This resulted in higher items per order and better retention. The feature also allowed thredUP to provide better suggestions based on what type of brands users shopped most frequently.
When thinking through Saved Brands, many flows and endpoints were thought through to make sure that the interaction was understandable for ease of initial activation, as well as updating and turning it off and on.
Interactions across desktop, tablet and phone views were created and tested for overall usability.
While building this feature, thinking mobile first became our biggest priority as we discovered larger cohorts of paid traffic were coming to our site on mobile web. Thinking this way allowed us to not overcomplicate views with the reduced amount of screen real estate.
Between toggles, buttons, check boxes and radio buttons we tested multiple stylings
between users to make sure the feature was intuitive and usable in all use cases.
Several concepts were created including
a full page profile option. A simplified version, moving the interaction into the pre-exisiting filters was the final result to best introduce new and existing users to the feature.
Adding favoriting to the website was one of the most requested features from users. Most users would utilize their cart as a means to save items for later. This form of cart hoarding would keep items from other users and resulted in skewed internal data.
Creating the space for favoriting started at low level wireframes and card sorting to make sure all use cases for the feature were clear. This led to organizing the space by department type and item availability. Item states were split into 4 segments:
• Sold
• Temporarily unavailable
• In your cart
• Purchased by you
This sorting helped us identify what the users primary actions would be next when coming to this page, allowing us to make it as purposeful of an experience as possible.
Because each item on thredUP is unique it is very likely that favorited items may not always be available when a user returns to the site later. During user testing we had users interact with the hub to get an idea of how users responded to seeing some of their favorited items were unavailable.
User feedback:
"This is painful."
"I don't want
to see them anymore."
"Those items are dead to
me now."
To ease user frustration in this moment,
I prototyped a replacement interaction where similar items were easily available to the users right away. During testing, the use of this tool became a moment of excitement and fun rather than loss and disappointment for users.
Because favoriting is such an interactive moment and fun experience for users I animated several possible "hearting" interactions that would occur when a user favorites an item. Animating the heart needed to feel fun but also quick and not too overbearing, as users would be doing a lot of clicking and I didn't want it to become an annoyance.
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Shopping secondhand, while increasing in prominence, is still not as accessible or trusted as normal retail stores. To help with this barrier to entry, thredUP developed a chrome extension that helps shoppers compare normal retail items to similar, lower cost secondhand items available on thredUP.
Increase retention through clear product benefits
Allow for new user discovery by linking more well-known brands into the experience.
Build brand trust and purpose.
If a user has the extension installed, whenever they are shopping an item on a comparable retailer in our database, they would be shown similar thredUP items to that same item. They would also be able to save the item to a wishlist page on thredUP that they could shop later.
