Quick Summary

The Problem: Nature’s Sunshine has 600+ products and nobody can easily find what they were looking for.

The Solution: Create a topical iconography system so people can actually find what they want.

The Results: A 38% increase in usage, becoming the most utilized page on the site. The ease of use has resulted in 49% of purchases using the tool.

Initial Assesment

I was recruited to Nature’s Sunshine as a UX Designer to help with their digital transformation. The website was dated and not user friendly at all with an essentially non existent mobile experience.  Search functionality was poor and the menu system was enormous. With over fifty items to look at new customers couldn’t find what they were looking for, got overwhelmed and abandoned the site.  As we watched user interactions through Hotjar, looked at Google Analytics data and hosted user interviews it became clear that the information overload was the first problem that we had to address. 

Competitive Analysis

I did a comprehensive competitive analysis pulling together user experiences from industry leaders, data from Statista, JungleScout, SEMRush and began user interviews with our very active distributor base who were more than happy to point out where we were falling short and just as happy to be a part of our analysis. After our user interviews, card sorting and tree testing we came up with the basic architecture for the menu system.

Key Insights from our research:

• Users most frequently came with a specific health concern rather than looking for a specific supplement.
• Customers were more satisfied with their purchases when they consistently took their supplements.
• Users needed more product information to make a decision but the large number of products were overwhelming for them.

Prototyping

The studies we conducted and our competitive analysis showed us that users were looking for solutions to specific health problems that they were having. We collaborated with the Science and R&D Departments to define categories and help us assign each one of our 600+ into at least two areas of interest. While we were collaborating with the science team we also worked with the Creative Department to create easily identifiable iconography for the categories so that people could see something familiar. 

Once we had categorized the products and received finalized assets from the Creative group we created a spec sheet for the dev team that would display items based on product tags, making an incredibly simple to use and easy to maintain tool for product categories. Once development was finished we taught the Product Team how to use the tool so new products could be launched without any need for a developer.

Testing

The menu system was designed to be intuitive and it succeded. When we launched the new menu sysytem we saw a 38% increase in usage/engagement over the previous menu system. Since launch the health topics menu has been used in 49% of purchases, making it the number one used page on the website.

Optimization #1
Once we had enough user data we could see which categories were most used so we re-ordered the menu system to include the most popular categories in the first row to allow for more visibility and ease of use. This change resulted in 4% more engagement.