Student Sell-Thru

Research, Strategy, and Redesign

Student Sell-Thru flow redesign

A website that allows higher education student to purchase learning materials

Harvard Business Publishing wanted to research and redesign their student sell-thru flow in order to manage significant drop-offs across their purchase journey of “Coursepacks”.

Overview

Info

Role

User Experience Designer

Timeline

February 2022 - Present

Problem

The business was seeing major drop-off rates and wanted to identify a way to enhance the UX of the purchase flow so they could realize improvements and see a reduction in traffic drop-offs

Outcome

I was able to research, gather insights, and create a new flow that allowed students a more streamlined process that directly cut drop-off rates and increased profits.

Research

Initial Flow

After several stakeholder interviews, including the back-end team so I could understand the functional and security requirements, I created a breakdown of the initial flow to really understand the users purchasing process. Right away I noticed several red flags that I hypothesized were creating drop-offs in the purchase flow. Specifically, around the initial page which opened to a forced registration. To test my hypothesis:

I compared my hypothesis to the analytical data we had on the flow. This showed me exactly which pages had the highest drop-off rates and aligned with the potential UX issues I initially saw.
I wrote a script and ran user tests asking users specifically about their expectations for each upcoming page, and how they wanted to purchase learning materials, to see how the UX aligned with expectations.
I researched best practices for ecommerce registration and compared that to the initial flow and what our specific security requirements could allow.
I compared the insights from the user tests to my initial hypothesis and best practice research.

Research Results

Following testing I analyzed the data and created extensive insights that I linked and presented for all stakeholders to review.

In summary:

Overall, the test contributor’s expectations of what they were going to see when they first clicked the link were not met or understood. Based on the test results as well as best practice research, I had several recommendations to move forward with. All would need to be tested before put into place:

My UX Recommendations:

Based on feasibility check with the devs: Move the registration to a later step after the user has received more context and information. Best practice would be to blend it with the billing page, but functionally is not possible because of a third-party platform.
Move the sign in option as well but continue to keep both in the top nav so users can easily sign-in early in the process if they want.
Provide information on the coursepack, the benefits to purchasing through HBP, and the cost right away so users understand what they are getting into. This could mean lightly editing and then moving the coursepack details page to be the first page in the flow that users view when clicking a coursepack link from an educator.

These recommendations also aligned with the result and recommendations of a previous test on the billing pages that I ran:

Contributors liked what they saw as far as the layout, indicated that was what they expected to see initially, but most were not expecting to need to purchase something. This was a shock. Recommendations:

Move this experience to the first page and give users the information immediately. We would likely still have some drop-offs but should only happen on one page instead of multiple places in the flow.

There was also some indicated confusion around the optional items we offered and students not knowing if they were going to be adding those to their cart when they clicked “Add Coursepack to Cart”

I further recommended several new CTAs and provided a lot of helpful comments to the marketing team as well as shared the feedback I recieved about Gen AI and acquiring learning materials for future development.

Next Steps

After completing the research and presenting to the stakeholders, it was determined that substantial changes and improvements needed to be made to the initial import page, so students were provided information on first visit instead of having to register first. This worked included teaming the the dev team to work through technical constraints and fully redesign the sellthru flow. I created two optional flows and presented to stakeholders including adding a brand-new registration intercept page that appeared before the checkout page which aligned with best practices and our functional requirments.

After many iterations and discussions with stakeholders, I finalized a new flow including all responsive mode designs. I then worked with the devs to create a flow that matched all seven user types within our functional constraints. The final flow streamlined students purchasing experience and was able to reduce drop-offs and increased profits.

Retrospective

Reflection

I loved this project. It was full of twists and turns and puzzles because of the functional requirments. Although this is an ecommerce site, it is not as straight forward because of security measures. I’m glad I had a great dev team to provide background context!

What I learned

I love puzzles and this was no different. I learned that sometimes “best practices” won’t align with your requirements and the right thing to do is to continue to advocate for YOUR user while in the constraints of your project’s requirements. You don’t have to reinvent the wheel; you just have to do right by the users you are serving.