StickerGiant is a custom label and sticker producer located in Longmont, Colorado. As a Forbes top 25 small business, the 39-person organization is 100% online, so their website is critical to their success and growth. And every single day, StickerGiant makes customer service a priority.
StickerGiant has grown consistently over the past five years, both in team size and revenue. As a result any incremental changes we make to their sales process can have a positive or negative impact on the overall business.
Last year (2017) we launched a complete redesign of stickergiant.com and as a part of that process we highlighted some areas of the site that could use some user testing and ultimately updates in an effort to streamline the experience and increase revenue.
Area of Concern
During some research studies we were conducting with customers, we started to see patterns of concerns with the proof approval process. In fact, it was an area of the site that we had noted as a troublesome area before the launch of the redesign. Approving a proof was a confusing process, which ultimately lead to more pressure on the StickerGiant customer service reps.
Proof Approval Process
Once you upload your artwork to the StickerGiant website a process begins in the background whereby a customer service rep receives the order, reviews your artwork and then passes it on to the art department to be prepped for your proof and printing. Once that proof is created it gets added to your account and you receive an email with a link to a proof approval page. This page ultimately caused confusion (and rightfully so).
Some of the issues with the proof approval page included:
- Clicking the proof link opened a new tab to view it, but you had to return to the previous screen to complete the approval
- We didn’t show a thumbnail preview of the customers sticker, so customers approving multiple pieces of artwork became confused about which order they were working on
- The CTA buttons looked like they were in a dimmed state adding to confusion
- No ability to have threaded conversation between the customer and the CSRs
- The dimmed-out section and unclickable “continue” button was confusing
Redesign the Approval Process
During our discovery phase we highlighted a number of things that contributed to the overall failure of the page.
We knew the page was troublesome but to redesign the page and know if the changes we were making were effective, we needed to have a baseline measurement of customer understanding of the current live page. We started by testing the current page using a method called first click testing. We recruited 100 users and ran the users through a series of scenarios. The user would read the scenario and click on the page to accomplish the task. Once they made the first click, it moved on to the next scenario. This gave us our baselines for all future tests.
Our first step in the redesign was to create rough wireframes and test them using the same scenarios we used to get our baselines. Our goal was to ensure that we increased user understanding of what was expected. If the wires went backwards we would update them and retest. Our goal was to ensure we were getting the best possible understanding of the page.
Once we were happy test results, we took the wires and created comps and again ran the same scenarios against them to see how we were doing. At every stage we could see the numbers go up. Users could clearly understand how to approve their proof with the new design.
As a result of the redesign we’ve added:
- A thumbnail preview of your sticker(s)
- A single CTA button to focus the user
- Threaded comments between the customer and CSR
- Error messages that aided instead of inhibit the user
Outcome
Since launching the updated Proof Approval functionality, StickerGiant has experienced a decrease in customer service requests. This decrease equates to fewer internal distractions and more available resources. This shift means StickerGiant can spend more time focusing on overall growth.
