An agile Customer Journey improvement

Signup and Shop

Herbalife's global digital products provide shopping experiences for customers and distributors to purchase retail health and fitness products, find recipes and workouts videos and services, along with business tools for distributors that provide reporting, business management, and insights tools.

To use any of these tools, you're required to signup, and we received news that this has been a challenge for many users since we rolled out the "improved' signup experience. We wanted to get an in-depth view of the problems, where they were happening, who's affected, and then how best to solve.

My Role

Team

Timeline

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Management lead User Research and Experience.
User Research User Interviews 
Workshop Facilitation 
C-Suite and Regional Updates

Product Design Team MyHerbalife Root 
Signup & Shop 
Reports 
Support Center 


3 Months
2019

Problem

Our new customers and distributors were having trouble signing up and ultimately ordering a product. The Biggest complaint was that both experiences were complicated and took too long, especially when verifying personal information with the delay in some cases taking over a day to approve. We estimated a 20% drop-off rate during signup and an additional 25% drop-off during purchase. Any improvement in either of these funnels would be an incredible increase in conversion and customer and distributor satisfaction.

Goal

Understand where users were having problems with our signup and shopping flow and understand within a limited timeframe what small changes can be made to improve and demonstrate an improvement of experience while determining the next best steps and plan for overall improvement.

Services 

Current State Expert Review, Usability Studies, Usability Testing, Journey mapping, Team Wireframing, Workshop Facilitation, Inform Design, Development collaboration.

Deliverables 

Expert review readouts, Detailed Journey maps, Quality experience Scores, User interface designs, High fidelity prototype, Define Vision and Value.

Outcomes 

Working on a tight deadline, we identified critical problems and working with development to agile create quick solutions for immediate improvement for our end users.

While the solutions were quick, they were really bandaid on a much larger problem to solve. We worked with the business and executive stakeholders through an executive readout to propose and approve an extensive worldwide discovery project.

"Why is signing up so hard? This should be easy."
- a goHerbalife customer
Discovery
Discovery

"Why is this so hard! This should be easy."

Said many of our customers while signing up to purchase products.

The Problem

Signup and shop are a length and cumbersome process for our users. Because of too many confusing steps, many cannot complete, and many outright give up. This causes users to spend a fair amount of their time guiding customers from start to finish. This is the entry point and primary retail system for our company; if we solved this problem, it would give back the troubleshooting time to members to focus on their task.

Who are we improving this for?

Where are the obvious problems?

First, from our previous usability studies we identified two general personas for users that are new to our signup and shop flows.

Dwayne

Fit & Active Customer

“ I work out almost every day and
have improved my performance
significantly ”

Susan

New Distributor

“ I love the products, and I
think a part time Herbalife Business
will fit my lifestyle ”

Together as a team, we quickly started Identifying UI and technology bugs while we consecutively conducted usability studies and tests.

Customer journey war room

"Going analog," we printed and posted the flows, covering the walls, getting close-up & personal with the issues.

Collaborating on journey issues by walking the wall together

Several agile team members from the UX and development teams spent time going through the signup and shop process, getting a first-hand view of the problem areas and where they were along with the individual funnels.

Next, moving to digital we created detailed expert reviews for both main funnels. Highlighting ux pain points and ui problems.

When time is tough expert reviews are a great way to identify problems and quick fixes

Bringing the data together

Along with our first hand expert reviews we used Quantum Metrics and User Zoom to watch user sessions and conduct unmoderated online usability tests, gathering tons of data points to help build a better picture and set a baseline grade to build from, also lovingly called a Quality Experience score.

So many datapoints, so little time

A Quality Experience score, or QX score for short, lets us take Behaviors data, what they do, along with additudial data, what they say, and combine these dataponts into an easy understandable and measurable score, combining what can be an overwhelming amount of numbers into something that can be easily shared and understood by stakeholders, the business, product leads and executives.

Behavioral Data

Task Success

Task Time

Pageview and Clicks

Problems & Frustrations

Additudinal Data

Easy of Use

Trust & Credibility

Appearance

Loyalty, NPS

All said and done the QX score wasn't good...

26

out of 100% ... 😭

Thanks to our deep learning we found some clear issues like no clear messaging when entering password or creating an account, excess steps when signing up specially before checkout, and slow page loads between these steps.

We hypothesized that making some small changes, for example removing redundant steps and cleaning up error messages during password and checkout flows, and reducing redundant server calls we'd be able to raise the QX score by 40% without requiring a redesign ( for now. )

Solution

We reduced the steps in the signup flow from 15 to 6, updated all error messaging text and iconography, and cut redundant server calls by 90%. A update we were able to do directly in production and within one sprint or two weeks.

Time for the QX score, we ran usability studies with 40% of new users signing up while still keeping the legacy solution active incase a rollback was needed because the changes caused problems or we didn't see improvement.

And guess what... it worked.

76

a 250% increase from before 🥳 !!!

Readout

These were temporary fixed for a much larger problem.

We quickly realized we needed to propose a much larger initiative that would take the problem from a global perspective and potentially require a rework of the  user's experience and the products' underlying framework.

Any new work requires a project and budget approval from our direct Sr. management all the way up to our c-suite executives. This can be a tough gauntlet to get through and we wanted to wow the teams. To do this in we ran a "how might we" 1 week design sprint, tested against real users and with an additional one week for adjustment, correction and cleanup we had a mostly complete feature rich prototype to show our Sr. leadership and stakeholders.

The pressure's on...

With a complete clean presentation, a usable prototype, a suggested timeline and budget we successfly wowed the crowd, got stakeholder buy-in and the now called effortless project was approved.

Conclusion

You could argue that the signup and ordering process is the most important for our users and our business. With some quick learnings, we were able to iterate quickly and provide some small but robust solutions. Also, while reliving that the problem would need a much larger effort to solve. Thanks to the tight team dynamics between design, product, and development teams, we could come together with a comprehensive proposal and plan to tackle these broader issues. A clear understanding of what to focus on first got the buy-in from our stakeholders, including our executive leads.

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