GD Report Store: UX review and concept designs

Go through different journeys customers can take and at each step identify current issues and opportunities for improvement with rationales.

2023

Background

I was given three days to review the user journey of GD Report Store, where customers can search for a report, read the overview, download sample and make a purchase. I reviewed the website from a customer’s perspective and put together a report back to the client. I break down the pages into different steps of the user journey, then pointed out the issues and gave recommendations, finished the report by concept designs.

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UX audit

This was a quick turnaround project, I reviewed the website by thinking: how would I know GD is selling reports? If I’m going to buy a report, what do I want to see, what can help me to find the report that I want?

I broke the journey into 6 steps: Discovery > Visit > Analyse content > Consider to order > Decision > Purchase. The user will land on one or more pages in each step. There’s a specific purpose of each step, for example, when I’m on the Visit step, I would expect to see a lot of reports to choose from, I would be able to search for a report with ease, either by using search function or filters.

I found issues that would block the journey and cause confusions to the users. I made recommendation to fix the problem, most of them are quick fix that require less work but solve the issues.

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Concept designs

Although most of the issues can be fixed by tweaking, for example we can add CTA button and a feature section on the homepage to make it clear that GD is selling reports. I also gave advanced recommendations on the search function, where we can add recent searches, popular sector and instant search result to enhance the user experience of finding the reports they want.

Thoughts

I really enjoyed doing this little project, the client was impressed how detailed the report is and the solutions to fix the issues are actually easy to implement. It reminds me of doing usability tests, but instead of interviewing users, I was the user (with professional UX knowledge). I set scenarios for myself to test, I talked to myself when I was using the website, I marked down issues and solutions while doing it. If I was given more time, I would make a priority list of problems to fix as that’s the proper way to do it.