The MVP Ecommerce Site
Understanding the priority tasks sellers who come to Squarespace need to complete in order to have an ecommerce site they feel ready to publish.
When business owners are looking to build a website…
they have specific reasons, goals, or needs that are bringing them to take this step. Some may be looking to expand their sales from in person to online, others could be wanting an easier customer relationship manager or to bring multiple parts of their process all under one roof. Whatever their reason, these busy “sellers” are looking for a website builder that makes it easy to accomplish this crucial part of their journey to starting an online business.
As an embedded researcher I was focused on exploring how we can drive new sellers to their first sale on Squarespace. The goal of this work was to understand the goals potential sellers have for their website and the priority tasks of building said website that sellers would want to pursue, and using these insights to put the top priority tasks and guide users to their website goals.
Context
During my summer internship at Squarespace, I learned about the goals of my team and identified the need for and scope of a research in my team’s area. This project brought value to the team and challenged my skills as a researcher.
My Contribution
I scoped, planned, designed, and conducted this research project end-to-end as an embedded researcher on a cross-functional team, including the following tasks:
Learned about team/goals and identified the need and scope for a foundational research project
Proposed the research project and wrote a detailed research brief that discussed the business need, purpose of the study, key outcomes, participant profile, methodology, and schedule.
Recruited participants using Respondent.io including: developed participant profile, programmed screener, conducted a balanced recruitment, and managed recruiting logistics.
Wrote the discussion guide and prepped note-taking materials for the research.
Conducted 10 hour-long user interviews and led synthesis to determine key learnings.
Presented research findings at three global insights meetings including product and design leadership.
Tags Generative Research; Card Sort; Cognitive Walkthrough
Role UX Researcher
Duration June - August 2022
Team Theo Shure (Research), Edmund Armstrong (PM), Irina Kukushkin & Aaron Wu (Product Design), Charlie Clark & Karson Daescher (Engineering)
Outcome
The directional insights and product recommendations from this research have had immediate and longer term impact. These findings were used to improve the site’s guided onboarding experience and contextual onboarding cards. These findings also influenced future research about non-sellers and the research direction across partner teams. The insights from my work also impacted the broader strategy for Squarespace’s new user trial experience and the end-to-end experience.
From a professional perspective, I gained experience with card sort and cognitive walkthrough methodologies and gaining stakeholder buy-in. I also gained experience working as an embedded researcher, which involved scoping out impactful projects and balancing multiple projects at once.
I also had to create a final report for this project, which you can find here.
Impact
By identifying areas where the platform can be overwhelming for new sellers these findings helped to determine short and long term ways we could help new sellers meet their goals.
In the near term, this research has enabled Squarespace to surface the most important tasks for new sellers coming to Squarespace to set up their e-commerce site. Changes have been made to the Squarespace site onboarding experience and contextual onboarding throughout the Squarespace platform.
In the long-term, this research has influenced the research direction of other teams focused on the early Squarespace experience and the broader strategy for Squarespace's end-to-end experience as they look to add more tooling for other purposes.
| Context
Unveiling the Landscape: Understanding Long-Term Goals at Squarespace
Learning about the business goals to determine a strategic, high-impact research area to pursue.
Squarespace had invested time developing tools to help users run their online business with things like analytics, inventory, order fulfillment, and payment. While powerful, these tools were very underutilized as most users came to Squarespace simply to build a website, and weren’t aware of e-commerce features.
Squarespace is ramping up e-commerce offerings to target competitors like Shopify.
With many new features being built, Squarespace is also focused on improving onboarding to the platform.
As Squarespace’s offerings are growing, so is the need to introduce users to the platform and its’ capabilities. Across the organization, teams are experimenting with different styles of onboarding like walkthrough and video tutorials, contextual onboarding cards, and setup dashboard that walks users through getting started.
My team’s goal is to increase engagement with e-commerce features and retention of new users.
Our team was focused on getting e-commerce users set up and having a functional storefront quickly. From identifying new e-commerce users, onboarding them to features, and streamlining their set up process. Our team owned everything up until the user published their e-commerce site.
| Motivations
Uncovering the Mystery of E-Commerce Feature Avoidance
Leading with empathy to understand current user pain points and determine the scope of research to pursue.
Making changes in e-commerce settings had a direct impact on the website experience, but any change of system status was not revealed to the user.
I decided to put myself in the shoes of a new e-commerce user and build an online store. In this empathy driven journey mapping exercise, one of the primary issues I noticed was the stark separation between e-commerce and website building tools. E-Commerce tools live in a completely separate space from the website building tools Squarespace is well known for. Many of the settings in the e-commerce features had a direct impact on the website experience.
Attempts were being made to increase discoverability & adoption of e-commerce features.
From previous research we knew e-commerce users (AKA “sellers”) took longer to build their websites than non-sellers. 70% of users identified as sellers never opened the e-commerce features. In an effort to help sellers set up e-commerce functionality faster, A/B tests were being run to land users in the e-commerce part of the platform. However, 30% of users navigated away from e-commerce and never returned. Finally, for those sellers who were interacting with the e-commerce features, less than 25% of them were completing the existing onboarding tasks.
What tasks are new sellers trying to accomplish when they set up their first e-commerce site?
| Insights
Illuminating the Path Forward: The MVP E-Commerce Site
Research findings that changed our perspective on supporting seller’s goals.
Users’ Desired Outcomes:
The Minimum Viable Publishable (MVP) website for a new seller.
The top five tasks new sellers wanted to complete before publishing their site. Knowing these tasks meant we could showcase them more readily on the Squarespace platform, like in onboarding tasks and website templates.
Example: Sellers will only publish a website that includes products and social media links to build credibility.
User’s Mental Models Did Not Match Existing Experience:
The priority areas for e-commerce tools & website building tools to connect.
I uncovered that user’s mental models did not partition Squarespace’s setup between website and e-commerce. We needed features that assisted users no matter where they discovered them to facilitate their set up experience.
Example: Users want to initiate cart setup from the website builder. Today, this action exists and directs users to the cart settings within e-commerce.
Missing Features:
A deeper understanding of the features e-commerce needs to offer for sellers to adopt Squarespace as their e-commerce platform.
The priority of actions in the setup experience did not match the priority of actions that users wanted to accomplish. Some actions were missing entirely.
Example: E-commerce setup dashboard needs to include “add social media links” so users can quickly connect their social media to build credibility with their audience.
“Something to show that I’m not just some random guy who played football. I’m actually a coach, I have experience coaching kids, and that they can trust me.”
-Participant; Football Personal Trainer
Why is it important for you to include testimonials from clients on your site?
Reflection
What challenges did I face during this research?
During this project, there was just as much for me to learn about how to be a better researcher as there was learning to manage the processes and tools that Squarespace was using.
When I think about what I learned to be a better researcher, some of my main takeaways were:
Communicate with your stakeholders early and often. Having buy-in from my stakeholders at every stage of this process meant we were always aligned on the goals of the project. This also made it simpler when I asked others to contribute, whether that was during brainstorming for things like what to cards include in the mixed card sort or their willingness to take notes/participate/watch interview sessions.
You have to manage scope creep for your project in order to not get lost in the possibilities. This was something I had to learn to do with external stakeholders having related asks that they wanted me to include in the research. I also had to learn to manage this coming from myself when it came to what defining what research questions we wanted to answer, what I could include in the discussion guide, etc.
When I reflect on the processes and tools I used, and how they impacted what I will do in my research process going forward, I think about these things:
Recruiting participants needs to be done with care and attention. I felt that our participant pool was not very diverse. Most of our participants were women and no one had a (disclosed) disability which would have affected how they used the Squarespace platform. In the future, I want to give myself more time to recruit participants so that I can be more intentional about including a diverse participant pool that still meets the participant profile while bringing in a range of perspectives and experience. Additionally, we used Respondent.io for recruiting participants, but I made mistakes in the way I set up the schedule which resulted in several back-to-back sessions and last minute shuffling. I now know how to avoid this mistake in the future.
Consider how you may want to synthesize information before starting sessions. When we began taking notes, we had an excel sheet that correlated to each question and a FigJam file where we put the participant’s card sort results. However, these resources quickly became unwieldy. Towards the end of the sessions was when we finally began using the session cards (which ended up being great for easy synthesis) to keep things organized, but it took a lot of time to go back through previous session recordings and notes to create session cards from when we hadn’t been using them.