UX Strategy and Recommendations for cabi's Product Suite

cabi is a women's clothing brand that specializes in direct selling through "Stylists." They have 9 separate products that range from a consumer-facing ecommerce website to tools that help Stylists run their own business.

Each of these 9 products had been built with minimal thought given to UX and UI best practices with several of them becoming massively overweight in content. Many of them were confusing to use with Stylists and end-consumers alike becoming frustrated.

1) Evaluate cabi's existing products. 2) Conduct interviews with cabi stakeholders to determine long-term strategy. 3) Provide concrete recommendations to cabi on how to improve the user experience.

We delivered to the client a comprehensive UX strategy report that helped set them up for success in the future. This report also helped guide our design team during our redesign of these products.

To understand what we were working with, we first had to take a deep dive into evaluating the cabi brand as things stood. This gave us a baseline to compare against when providing our recommendations.

Because those 9 cabi products were so different, we wanted to take a closer look at each from a qualitative perspective. Utilizing Jakob Nielsen's 10 Usability Heuristics, we evaluated each cabi product in order to see what was working well, and what could be improved.

We took a deep dive into the analytics for the cabi online site to understand how users were navigating it and where there were certain areas that could be improved. We paid particular attention to areas like the signup and checkout flow where the data said that people did not like having to sign up and complete a preferences survey to check out.

The interviews for this project were a bit unique since there were three distinct categories of people we interviewed: cabi stakeholders, Stylists, and hostesses. All in all, we conducted more than 80 interviews for this project.

We spoke with a variety of cabi stakeholders from a number of different departments to get a fuller picture of the cabi business. This insight helped formulate some of our recommendations as there were certain things that we wanted to recommend but were a no-go from a business perspective.

There are several cabi products geared specifically and used exclusively by stylists. Speaking with them helped us fill in the knowledge gaps where we had no analytics to support our post-evaluation recommendations. For example, we learned which parts of the cabi Clio back office site were most utilized, and which had no value.

For all intents and purposes, the Hostesses are the users of the cabi site. They host in-person parties for Stylists in exchange for discounts on the clothes, but they are otherwise just regular customers. From them we learned what pain points they were having with the consumer-facing apps like the online website and cabi Tap.

Due to the volume interviews that we did, we utilized spreadsheets to record data and look for patterns in the responses to help guide our recommendations. We organized the data within this system both by interview role and by product to help break down the information into manageable chunks.

While we were able to go in depth with 28 Stylists during our interviews and learn a lot of valuable information, there was still a lot of ground to cover. We created a survey that received more than 450 responses from Stylists where we asked 30 questions, such as:

It was one thing for customers to tell us how they were interacting with cabi products (and where their pain points were), but it was another to see them in action.

We focused our efforts on the 3 cabi products that are most utilized by customers: the online website, the mobile app, and the virtual fashion show web app. We were interested in learning whether users could complete certain tasks within each product and whether they felt that anything was missing.

The crux of our UX strategy report was to provide recommendations to our client on how they could improve their products.

We provided cabi with 19 recommendations for improving their site, as well as 3-4 specific action items for each recommendation. For example, one of our recommendations was to "Remove Barriers to Purchase" with an action item that includes "Make account creation option at the end of the checkout flow." Each recommendation was backed up by the specific research we had done that supported its inclusion.

It wasn't just enough to give this report to cabi. We wanted to walk them through our findings in detail as well as providing the rationale behind our recommendations. This consisted of a 2-hour long presentation of our UX report, with ample time for them to ask any questions.

Overall, the UX report was very well received by the cabi team. They were eager to get started in working with us to improve various products, but our first project with them ended up being the creation of their 20th anniversary site. We were able to lean on the research we had already done while supplementing it with additional interviews to nail down a direction for this site.