Shop Direct’s user experience lab has revolutionised how the retailer manages its sites – how has the ecommerce team done it?

As profits have grown, so too has Shop Direct's confidence as it invests in a digital future. One of its new projects has been the growth of its user experience lab, which is helping to revolutionise its approach to IT and ecommerce development.

In Shop Direct’s 80-year history, it’s arguable that the past 10 years have been the most transformational for the UK’s biggest online retailer.

In 2005, the company started the job of merging two huge businesses – Littlewoods and Gus – while simultaneously evolving to meet the demands of an increasingly online world.

The retailer’s years of hard work have now started to bear fruit. In October 2013, it recorded its first pre-tax profit in 10 years, and at the end of October this year it posted a 512% surge in profits to £40.4m for the 12 months to June 30.

As profits have grown, so too has the retailer’s confidence as it invests in a digital future. One of its high-profile new projects has been the growth of its user experience lab, which is helping to revolutionise its approach to IT and ecommerce development. Opened in January, 350 members of staff have used it to experiment on Shop Direct’s five websites.

Ecommerce director Jonathan Wall says the lab has been “a tremendous success”. Part of the achievement has been financial – by testing innovations before they are rolled out, Shop Direct has avoided making costly mistakes, and is only investing in things it knows will work.

But the biggest win, Wall says, is how it narrows the gap between customers and staff – for the first time they can watch how shoppers use the sites. “It’s been a tremendous success for us. It’s not about the specific money made from a test but about bringing the customer close.”

Shop Direct chief information officer Andy Wolfe says: “If a test fails, we put it to one side. We don’t have to do engineering work if it doesn’t pass. We’re not wasting resources.”

Link to customers

The retailer uses the lab to run about 50 tests a month on its websites, and the aim is to get that up to 100 by June 2015. Around a third of the tests are successful, a third fail and a third are inconclusive. Wall says the challenge is to increase the number of tests while maintaining this success rate.

The process varies according to what is being tested, but generally involves building a prototype of a service before customers are asked to try it out. Eye-tracking technology is used to show where they look on web pages. Shop Direct staff can watch customers from another room and listen to them as they are quizzed on their interaction with pages.

Wall says the in-house lab is a big improvement on the third-party labs Shop Direct previously used. “We have always used user experience labs, but we wanted to bring it in-house to get better stakeholder engagement. It used to be really hard to get people [in the business] to join us, the people owning the product we were trying to develop.”

Engaging with groups such as buyers and merchandisers means the team members get a much more direct link with shoppers. “You don’t get the feeling of what the customer is doing until you see the customer interacting with the website.

“The lab shows us what’s happened, why it’s happening, and why customers are behaving in certain ways. It means we can understand why they’re interacting with certain features. It drives our ability to make improvements.”

Much of the work done at the lab is on tiny, blink and you’d miss them, changes. But these can have a surprising effect on conversion rates.

Wall gives the example of the ‘Sale’ gallery page on the Very.co.uk site. Before, it would list the Sale price and the former full price of each product, but the ecommerce team found that removing the ‘before’ price increased conversion by 0.9%. “When we cleaned it up, the key selling price was easier to spot,” he says.

Most of the work in the lab is based on a process of ‘continuous change’, as the ecommerce team make tweaks to the front end of the sites. They use site browsing data – that 20% of shoppers abandon their baskets when they arrive at the payment page, for example – to identify possible problems, and create tests to see if they can improve things or find out why something is happening.

“It’s not about the money made from a test but about bringing the customer close”

Jonathan Wall, Shop Direct

Wall says: “One small idea builds a whole host of other ideas. It’s about fast failing as well. It speeds up our ability to do this.

“It’s data-led and we use other tools. It’s all in the front end of our ecommerce world. It doesn’t need Andy’s team until we find the winners. We tell them what to develop.”

At the same time, Wolfe’s team will work on bigger projects, and run its own tests to make sure the sites are operating properly. Some of the bigger changes to Shop Direct’s websites, which the IT team will often manage, will come from ideas generated by external sources.

“We are always looking at what the market is doing, and comparing ourselves with the competition. There isn’t one competitor who’s got everything, whether it’s social, reviews, gallery pages or navigation, so we pick out the best of the best,” says Wall.

He adds: “We’ve also got good connections with the Israel and London technology scenes, we listen to what’s going on in the market, and we have a lot of small technology partners who approach us as well.”

Culture change

One of the bigger challenges was convincing staff across the business of the benefits of testing. Wall says that in 2010, the retailer built a new product page for its sites – it was a project that involved 18 stakeholders. “When we tested it, it failed massively. It would have cost us £17m over the peak period if we had put it live. It was a massive win for us. But the biggest win was people realising that testing is the way forward,” he explains.

Sam Barton, head of user experience at Shop Direct, adds: “We wanted to change people’s perceptions. Getting them close to the customer made them realise that they don’t have the answers.”

He notes that analytics and data can only tell retailers so much. “The feedback is really valuable – you can look at analytics and data, but until you see customers and what they’re doing, you can’t get a true idea of what they’re doing,” he says.

Testing has also helped the retailer understand how shoppers react to the creative elements of the sites. Barton says:

“We like to create big inspirational websites, but actually the important thing for customers is finding the product. We find that the more content there is on the site, the harder it is to navigate around.”

Before the user experience lab was in place, the process of testing a project and digesting the results could take up to 18 months. Now, Wall says the process takes 18 days. The speed that the lab has enabled, coupled with a new testing culture, means that step by tiny, incremental step, Shop Direct is revolutionising how it operates in a digital era.