WORK: UO IA

Urban Outfitters: MRKT Navigation

UO MRKT has since added new items, such as Pet Accessories, to their broad assortment.

 

BACKGROUND

With Urban Outfitter’s launch of “UO MRKT” - a curated selection of products from like-minded brands and sellers - the brand’s web production team was interested in learning how users would categorize the new products introduced through the program that didn’t seem to fit within our already existing categories.

OBJECTIVES

I narrowed down the brand’s concerns into the following high level questions:

  • Under which L1 category (top level, broadest category) do users expect the new items to live?

    • Our assumptions include: the Apartment category, or under a new category that also encompasses the already existing Music + Tech category

  • If users expect a new L1 category to be created (to encompass new items as well as Music + Tech), what should this be called?

    • Our assumptions include: Tech + Gear, Activities, Life, Lifestyle

  • What names are most fitting for the new L2 categories for the new products?

    • Our assumptions include:

      • Smoke Shop, Smoking Accessories

      • Sexual Health, Self Love, Sex Toys + Accessories, Personal Care

      • Skate, Skateboarding

* to note — I ensured that users were not biased by any of our naming assumptions by asking them to name groups of products before presenting them with our own category names; more often than not, users ended up choosing similar - if not the same - names for the L1s and L2s presented

METHODS

I chose to utilize multiple research methods to answer our questions, all utilizing a different sample of users:

  1. Open Card Sort: an open Card Sort was used to determine how users would categorize the new products (smoke, sex, and skate) in relation to Music + Tech products and Apartment products (n = 30)

    • While the test was "Open”, I encouraged users to only create and name TWO groupings, so I could see how users associate the products

  2. UO Customer Panel Survey: a large-scale survey was sent to users from our email database to gain insight into the naming of our new L2s (smoke, sex, and skate) (n = 404)

  3. Tree Test: based on our findings from the first two studies, I created two separate Tree Tests to validate our findings and test users on speed // correctness of categorization (n = 30)

FINDINGS

  • Users expect the new products from sex, smoke, and skate categories to live under an “Entertainment/Lifestyle/Skateboards” L1 separate from “Home/Apartment”

 
 

  • When asked which names were BEST for the new categories, users voted the following:

    • New L1 to replace Music + Tech: Lifestyle (60.6% of users)

    • New L2: Smoke Shop (51%) or Smoking Accessories (30%)

    • New L2: not obvious split, but Self Love (26.6%), Personal Care (19.8%), and Adult Toys + Accessories (15.9%)

      • In open-ended response for “Sex” items, most used term to describe was Beauty

    • New L2: Skate Shop (66.7%)

 
 
 
 

Word cloud of unaided user suggestions for the “sex” products category

 
 

  • Tree test of new navigation showed that users had issues with the name “Self Love” when it came to categorizing sex products, and were often placing items in “Wellness”, which is an L2 under “Beauty” or L3 under “Women’s” > “Beauty”

 
 
 
 
“The only thing I was a little unsure of was the ‘self love’ category. I could not determine if the condoms would be found in ‘self love’ or ‘wellness’.”
— Tree test participant
 
 

RECOMMENDATIONS

  • Introduce a new Lifestyle L1 (to replace Music + Tech)

  • Introduce new L2s under Lifestyle —

    • Consider term Wellness for the Sex Shop/Personal Care items — this is what our sister brand Free People uses to accommodate similar items (and users were trying to put items in Wellness under Beauty)

    • Introduce Smoke Shop and Skate Shop categories

 

Old navigation

 

New navigation, on site today (Sept 2018)

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