Trouva
After the launch of a new social commerce strategy at Trouva, I led the design for the iterations and experiments to improve the MVP product.
Role
Design Lead
Timeframe
July - December 2023
Team
1 Product Manager
1 UX Researcher
1 Engineer
2 Stakeholders
Context
Trouva is a highly curated marketplace, selling products from independent boutiques across the UK and Europe.
Trouva's unique selling point (USP) is its community of boutiques, each offering a unique vision and product selection. This value was reinforced by a customer survey, where 70% of respondents cited unique products as a key motivation for shopping on Trouva, and 66% cited supporting independent boutiques.
70%
66%
The Challenge
Traffic analysis showed that users arrived from various sources, including email subscribers, Google Shopping, social media, and organic traffic, with 42.68% landing directly on a product page. This made it difficult for Trouva to highlight its USP to potential customers.
In an annual survey, a common pain point identified was discoverability - users reported the main menu had too many options that made navigation a challenge.
There was also a lack of understanding regarding the pricing of products on Trouva. Since the USP was not always emphasized, users often did not understand why Trouva's prices were not always competitive.
User Needs
Further user interviews were conducted to dive deeper into some of the pain points, resulting in the key user needs to be addressed:
In 2023, to boost engagement and expand the customer base, the business launched a social commerce strategy using short videos to engage customers. Given the high social media activity among customers, Trouva leveraged its community of boutiques and creators to post videos on its platform, tagging products for direct purchase.
Usability testing showed positive feedback from existing customers who appreciated seeing products in real-life settings. The videos were expected to enhance product discoverability and inspire users, aligning with social media habits. Boutiques, eager to grow their customer base and showcase their individuality, found posting videos on Trouva feasible, as many were already using Instagram for similar purposes.
My role
I joined the team just as the MVP was launched with a select number of Boutiques and Creators creating content. The business wanted to get the product to market as soon as possible, iterating as we go with the hopes of an enhanced version to be ready in time for Christmas trading.
Entry Points Experimenting
A key part of this iterative phase was experimenting with the best placements for short videos that would gain most visibility and traction. This was conducted through several experiments in which we placed entry points to the Explore Feed in different areas of the site and measured the impact.
Key Metrics
Visibility rate: What percentage of users across the site are seeing the entry points?
Click through rate (CTR): Of those users seeing the entry points, how many are clicking into the video?
Conversion rate (CVR): How many of those users going on to make any purchases?
Gross merchandise value (GMV): Indirect and Direct GMV as a result of viewing the short videos
Usability tests
To gain qualitative insights into the experiments, I was involved in several usability tests led by the UX Researcher and conducted with existing Trouva shoppers that had not yet seen the Explore short video feed. The objective was to understand how shoppers come across short video entry points in the context of their journey and ideas to improve short video engagement.
Video thumbnails in Product pages & Category pages
With some technical issues still being addressed and bugs still being captured, we began with a low risk placements. On category pages we placed static video tiles at the bottom of the page, below pagination buttons. On product pages, we surfaced video content specific to the boutique along with the main explore feed.
Next steps
Hypothesised that since short videos was a new feature on Trouva that we were yet to send out marketing comms about, perhaps users did not expect the thumbnails to represent videos. As a temporary solution, I added a play button on top of each video while the engineers did some technical scoping into animating the videos.
Next iteration: Experiment with thumbnails in search & menu nav.
Key Takeaways
Future Ideas
Onward journeys in short videos
The success of Experiment 5 encouraged me to consider how this integration of videos and products could be used to address additional pain points and complement user behaviour.
I redesigned the product feed on short videos to have a mix of video and product content with relevant categories being surfaced below exact products.
Combined wishlists
Another key observation from the usability tests was the use of the wishlist:
4 of the 5 shoppers observed used their wishlist to save items they were considering buying
A purchase was unlikely to happen in a single session - they collect, compare and narrow down their shortlisted products over time.
While any enhances to the wishlists were deprioritised for short videos, I created a future concept in which users could save both videos and products to specific wishlists to create boards of inspiraton, similar to how one uses Pinterest.
Aimed at addresses user needs:
