Introduction:

E-commerce sites lose almost half of their potential sales because users cannot use the site. In other words, with better usability, the average site could increase its current sales by 79% (calculated as the 44% of potential sales relative to the 56% of cases in which users currently succeed). (NN Group)

Bed Bath & Beyond Inc. is an American chain of domestic merchandise retail stores. Bed Bath & Beyond operates many stores in the United States, Canada, and Mexico. (Wikipedia)

We take it as a research target because it planned to close 200 stores in North America and focus more on e-commerce to receive profit during the COVID pandemic period.

However, the customer reviews of Bed Bath & Beyond.com is not good.

The goal of this case study:

• Gain knowledge of Heuristic evaluation and put it into practice
• Define and prioritize the website major problems
• Conduct Usability Test to validate the redesign result

Process:

• Secondary research
• Heuristic evaluation
• Define & Prioritize problems
• Competitive analysis
• Sketch
• Hi-Fi Mockup
• Usability Test

Research:

Secondary research:

As I mentioned, the customer reviews of Bed Bath & Beyond are not good. Many reasons could cause the result. To find out how many of them are related to design problems, I checked the customer reviews in the “1-star” area. Here is what I found:

Key findings from the customer review:

• Navigate bar is not user-friendly. It makes customers feel hard to find the items they want to purchase
• Customers have trouble cancel their order. The website doesn’t provide a clear guide.
• The fonts somewhere on the website are too small for customers with less good eyesight or seniors hard to see

Heuristic Evaluation:

Based on the standards from NN Group’s article 10 Usability Heuristics for User Interface Design. We found the following design problems:

• Consistency and standards

Example:

When browsing the pages, we found many product description inconsistency. The buttons under the price sometimes different from each other. Any layout is not in the same format as well.

• Aesthetic and minimalist design

Example:

The item details page is overwhelming. As a customer, we want to get the key information for the price, delivery time frame, category.

I assume the company wants to give more options to the customers, but too many options can be confusing.

• Help and documentation

Example:

When I click the “chat with us,” nothing popped up, or any message guides me to the next step. And the “help center” function is hard to find.

Problem Prioritize:

After finding all the design problems from the research, I decided to focus on the following issues based on users/business impact:

#1. The navigation bar

Reseason:

The first rule of e-commerce design remains: if the customer cannot find the product, the customer cannot buy the product.

But in our new studies, the main problem was not so much finding the product as it was finding information about the product. Indeed, 55% of the 143 user failures we observed were caused by bad content — typically, incomplete or unclear information or uninformative error messages. Users sometimes indicated that they planned to call or email the site, a clear sign that the company had neglected the opportunity to answer their questions on the site itself. (NN group)

As an e-commerce website, one of the key functions is the “searching/filter bar,” as the customer complaint on Trustpilot mentioned that Bed Bath Beyond's navigation is hard to use.

Insight: Change the layout of the navigation bar and make it easy and clear for users from all ages

#2. The customer support page

Reseason:

Most of the bad reviews are complaining about the customer service of Bed Bath Beyond. In my personal experience, the “customer service button or page ” is hard to find, and no Live Chat available.

Insight: Move the “Help Center ” page to the navigation bar, and add a Live Chat function

#3. Too much information on the item description

Reseason:

Bad content kills the sales. Users make ordering decisions largely on the information on this page. Too much information will make users want to drop the website and shift to other competitors’.

Insight: Make the item description simple and concise.

Competitive Analysis

To gain inspiration on improving this feature, I did a competitive analysis with 4 direct competitors: IKEA, Amazon, Walmart, and Target.

#1. The navigation bar

The competitor's websites did a good job at :

• Only list a few categories, easy for users to choose
• The list of the category is organized and clear

Insight for redesign: Reorganized and simplify the category list

# 2. The “customer support” function is not obvious

• The Amazon website put the “Customer Service ” straightforward and obvious.
• The Walmart website has a “Live Chat” function, which makes users feel support 24/7.