Manic Panic Website UX Strategy

Manic Panic is one of the largest and oldest hair dye and beauty brands in the United States. Founded by punk rock icons Tish and Snooky Bellomo, their products have been used and loved by some of the biggest names in sports and entertainment.

Manic Panic came to us looking for help in evaluating their existing website and overall brand strategy. While the Manic Panic brand is iconic, their website was very much outdated and in need of a major facelift.

1) Evaluate their current site along a number of criteria. 2) Conduct interviews with Manic Panic stakeholders to determine long-term strategy. 3) Provide concrete recommendations to Manic Panic 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 eventual website redesign.

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

The first matter of business was to take a look at the Manic Panic site through the lens of Jakob Nielsen's 10 Usability Heuristics. They specifically struggled in the area of aesthetics and minimalist design, often using bright colors in an attempt to WOW the user. We also identified a few key items, which we dubbed "Low Hanging Fruit" that we could fix tomorrow that would improve the overall user experience.

It's vital that our recommendations are backed up with data. We took a deep dive into Manic Panic's Google Analytics to see how users were browsing the site and where they were having trouble. One pain point we discovered was during the checkout process where 68% of all users were abandoning their purchase. Data like this allowed us to key in on the reasons why.

Google Analytics also helped us understand the demographics of the users. Stakeholders had their own assumptions, but they proved to be inaccurate, specifically with regard to both age and gender breakdowns. This information later informed our persona creation phase.

We looked at competitors to see how they were solving for basic UI patterns, such as filters and navigation—things we had previously identified as problems with the Manic Panic site. While some of these could be improved simply by using best practices, our competitor analysis helped us identify specific, repeated patterns within this space.

Interviewing stakeholders is and has always been a crucial part of our research strategy. It helps give us insights into areas of the business that might not be apparent on first glance, or even within the data.

We conducted 6 interviews with Manic Panic stakeholders in order to learn their points of view and lean on their subject matter expertise. This opened our eyes to other additional recommendations we could make, such as the fact that some of their product copy was not as SEO friendly as it could be.

After our interviews, we needed to find patterns in responses so we could prioritize our action items. Creating an affinity map of their responses helped us organize our data.

Putting together existing site maps and key user flows gives us a chance to see the overall structure of the site and where users are funneled. It also gives us something to compare against when providing our own versions of these.

Understanding the full scope of the Manic Panic site proved to be a daunting task as the site map was very large, not just due to the sheer amount of products they had, but also because of how the information was organized in the first place. Mapping out their site helped put everything in perspective.

Manic Panic's user flows weren't in bad shape, but there were some low-hanging fruit areas that we identified. For example, when clicking on an "Add to Cart" CTA, the user was automatically redirected to their cart instead of simply receiving feedback that an item was added. This likely resulted in smaller cart sizes as users may not have been ready to check out.

The crux of our UX strategy report was to provide recommendations to our client on how they could improve their site. In addition to the improved sitemap and user flows above, we also created personas and specific action items for Manic Panic to enact.

Utilizing the data we gathered during the evaluation phase, as well as some key insights by stakeholders, we created a couple of personas for Manic Panic that encapsulated who we understood their customers to be.

We provided Manic Panic with 24 recommendations for improving their site, as well as some specific action items to tackle. Our recommendations were scored on Effort and Impact scales (both from Low to High) that helped them prioritize what to do first.

It wasn't just enough to give this report to Manic Panic. We wanted to walk them through our findings in detail as well as providing the rationale behind our recommendations. This consisted of a 1-hour long presentation of our UX report, with ample time for them to ask any questions.

Although the timeframe and budget limited some of our strategies, namely usability testing and user interviews, we did produce a comprehensive report. Manic Panic was extremely pleased with the outcome and we were able to sign a contract for the full redesign for the website. Additionally, they solicited our help in taking over their email marketing (which had mostly been dormant).