Project Objective
My Role
The Outcome
A new content strategy for the websites sofa category, with a content hierarchy that’s validated through a JTBD survey and Competitor Usability Testing.
Project Background
Oak Furniture Land (OFL), a leading UK retailer most known for high-quality hardwood furniture, faced a unique challenge.
While their oak furniture was popular, their equally high-quality sofa range faced challenges gaining online traction, despite its strong in-store performance.
To address this disparity and enhance their position as a leading sofa retailer in the UK, my team and I undertook a project that focused on understanding customer needs to design a “best-in-class” online sofa category.
Our Approach
I combined qualitative and quantitative research with hands-on testing to uncover what really drives sofa purchases. I therefore focused on:
Understanding user needs through Jobs to Be Done interviews and surveys.
Measuring performance with usability testing on OFL’s site.
Learning from competitors by testing established tools and features.
Mapping the customer journey to align insights and opportunities across the purchase (and post-purchase) lifecycle.
Using these insights to drive a new content strategy for the sofa category
Our first step was to prepare and conduct 20 Jobs to Be Done (JTBD) interviews to uncover customers’ motivations, needs, and pain points when buying a sofa.
We explored more than just the functional needs to make sure that we understood users’ emotional and social needs when buying a sofa, of which there were many!
The interviews revealed that sofa purchasing involves a complex, multi-stage journey that was more akin to significant investments like buying a car or house. We discovered that customers typically took twelve to eighteen months from initial consideration to purchase, navigating various stages such as inspiration, active research, reassurance, and post-purchase experience.
Building on interview insights, we designed and conducted a JTBD importance survey with 1,047 participants from a UK representative panel.
This quantitative research assessed the relative importance of the 35 user needs we identified in our JTBD interviews, such as material quality, comfort, delivery options, warranty. For each user need, participants were asked how important this aspect was to them on a scale of:
Not at all important
Somewhat important
Important
Very important
Extremely important
We ranked these needs to identify the top 5-10 priorities that OFL should address to deliver the best customer value.
Average scores were calculated for each user need to enable a ranking system
Following our JTBD research, we’d gained a great understanding of the UK sofa-buying journey and a prioritised list of users needs. However, we still needed to identify how well the OFL website performed against these user needs and where experience gaps existed.
Therefore, we conducted usability testing with 12 participants to evaluate the OFL website’s performance against user expectations. Key findings included:
The delivery process was confusing, particularly around options and fees.
The lack of detailed information on sofa comfort and material quality compared unfavourably with competitors.
Financial information such as 0% finance options were presented too early in the journey, before users had a chance to ‘fall in love’ with a sofa.
As we moved into the recommendations phase, it was clear that whilst some low-effort opportunities were available, there were also a number of ideas that needed significant investments to make a difference. So with many of these expensive tools and features already available on competitor websites, we decided to test the effectiveness of those before recommending that OFL undertake any significant investment.
This revealed best practices in augmented reality visualisation, comfort demonstrations, and user-generated content (e.g. reviews with photos). As well as many areas and tools which didn’t effectively address our identified user needs.
A variety of existing (and expensive) tools on competitor websites were tested
By combining insights from JTBD interviews, usability testing, and competitor analysis, we created a comprehensive customer journey map.
This allowed us to pinpoint pain points and opportunities across each phase of the buying journey, from initial inspiration to post-purchase satisfaction.
This was printed onto A0 foam boards for Oak Furniture Land to put around their office to generate interest and alignment amongst stakeholders.
The UK sofa buying customer journey
The Outcome
We created a new content strategy for Sofa PDPs that emphasised the product attributes that matter most to customers at appropriate points in the purchasing journey. First, users needed to fall in love with the sofa and decide that the style, colour, comfort, and material quality would all meet their needs.
This involved designing new areas of the Sofa PDP, including dedicated sections with information on comfort, materials, dimensions and assembly.
Only then were they concerned with those more practical steps of the proposition. So payment options (e.g. 0% finance), delivery, and warranty information were all given secondary importance as these were considerations in the ‘reassurance’ step of the customer journey.
By shifting information to the appropriate stages in the customer journey and creating new sections to address the information gaps identified, we helped create a more intuitive flow that encouraged customers to focus on the emotional aspects of the purchase before addressing logical ones.
