Kay Jewelers Studies
How pleasant are the filtering and mobile search experiences? What terms are customers familiar with
In order to answer these questions, my group of 4 graduate students did a usability study with 8 participants and followed up with a survey of 116 adults in their target demographic detailed below. Our results led to concrete changes to Kay.com, including adding images for shape and color filters, decrease of text above results, “clear all” filters button, visual redesign of the mobile hamburger menu, and more!
What the mobile filters for metal color used to look like
Procedure
Usability Study
Usability Study
Usability Study
- Inspiration: According to internal analytics, users tended to abandon their journey while using filters, especially on mobile.
- Development: 8 adult participants from a sample of convenience were asked to search for specific pairs of earrings with certain traits on Kay's website. 4 were tested on mobile and 4 were on desktop using this script.
- Pilot tested with 2 users before launch of the usability study.
Survey
Usability Study
Usability Study
- Inspiration: Our previous usability study highlighted issues regarding terminology that we wanted to investigate further.
- Development: 116 participants who were an age 18+ sample of convenience answered 8 questions on Google Forms: 2 demographic, 2 open answer, 1 checkbox, 1 ranking question and 2 linear scales that can be viewed here.
- Pilot tested with 2 users before launch of the survey.
Results
Above is a word cloud showing the most frequent adjectives users gave the site along with their average rating. There were drastically longer completion times for mobile versus desktop, and we identified the mobile hamburger menu's design as a source of frustration. Lengthy text, inability to clear filters, and terminology confusion were also big frustration points mentioned by multiple users.
We did an in depth anaylsis for each question. Clear themes emerged of participants not being familiar with many jewelry terms, finding imagery with filters helpful, and not understanding what all filters were for. Full results are in the presentation at the bottom of this page.
Accepted Suggestions to Client Site
Kay.com today has a reduced intro text, a "clear all" filters button, and a mobile hamburger menu more similar to their competitors with a greyed out background (shown above).
Kay.com today includes our suggestion of images of what the stone cuts ( shown above) and metal colors are.