UX Case Study | 2021

About the project

With major retail partnerships newly-secured and upcoming product roll-outs planned, the Rotate team was looking to overhaul high-traffic areas of their e-commerce site to meet the needs of their growing brand.
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During a month-long sprint, I joined a 3-person design team to redesign several of the Rotate site's highest-trafficked pages.

The problem

Officially launched in 2019 through Kickstarter, where they raised over 600% of their goal, Rotate Watch Kits offers all-in-one kits to build your own mechanical watch.

The Rotate team came to us looking for a site upgrade that would increase conversion rate and average cart size. Since very little data was known of the site's current users, our team started by digging into Rotate's site traffic, performing a heuristics audit, conducting usability tests, and creating a competitor analysis.

Key Insights

1.) While 66% of the site's traffic came from visitors on mobile or tablet, most of the website was not optimized for smaller screen sizes.
This resulted in poor readability, long scrolling times, and an overall frustrating experience for users. It also explains why Exit Rates on the product pages were 18% higher on mobile than desktop.

2.) Many industry standards and UX best practices were not being followed on the current site.
This included general accessibility standards and Nielsen Norman Group's usability principles.

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3.) Average Session Duration on Rotate's site was lower than the industry average
This suggested that users weren't being encouraged to throughly browse the site's product offerings. From our user tests and site audit, we speculated that this could largely be attributed to the current site's sparse architecture and navigational limitations. One such example was the Shop Page, which featured extremely broad product categorization and a lack of filter/sort options.

THE PROCESS

It became clear from our research that the highest impact for the given time restrictions would be achieved by focusing on redesigning Rotate's Home Page, Shop Page, Product Page, and Support Page.

Our scope also included optimizing the site's architecture to allow easy navigation between pages, conceptualizing a build-your-own watch module, and redesigning the top nav bar and footer/site map.

To achieve the client's stated goals of increasing conversion and cart value, we knew we needed to focus on Guiding Users, Building Trust, and Boosting Engagement.

Navigation

Our research showed that Rotate's site had a major issue with navigation. Users were confused over the product offerings and frustrated with the product page experience, which required a lot of scrolling and displayed a lack of division among sections. This was also reflected in the site traffic report we created, which showed that Rotate's site had a high Exit Rate within the product pages.

To address these concerns, I designed a product page meant to minimize distractions, showcase the products' features, encourage cart add-ons, and increase Add-to-Cart rate.

Checkout flow

Since increasing the average cart value was important to Rotate, I wanted to design an effective checkout flow that promoted their interchangeable watchbands as an add-on item, without disrupting the purchase flow.

I also addressed a bug with the old site design that required users to input their initials (for embossing purposes) in order to add an additional watchband to their cart, which our usability tests revealed to lack clear feedback and turned away users who wanted to purchase a watchband without embossing.

MObile-First

To illustrate how the product page could be optimized for mobile browsers, I created a responsive prototype using Webflow, which effectively scaled the site and made use of sticky navigational components and CTA.

Leif Morton