Content Strategy Audit ID 460 UX Assignment 3 Christy Chan
Target Market The target customers of H&M are a broad group of consumers who follows fashion trends. The price points allow consumers to follow the newest trend without breaking their bank, which attracts mostly working class, middle class, and students who consider shopping as pleasure. Although H&M offers men and kids clothing, a large segment of the target market is women. The target market of H&M online stores shifts a little from the physical stores. Online shopping mostly targets consumers who are in the working class and have a busy schedule, having shopping done in the comfort of your own home and items shipped to your doorstep is unquestionably a plus. Younger people also use online shopping to buy clothes as it is of greater convenience to them.
Business, Brand, and User Goals H&M is a Swedish apparel and accessory store known for offering fast-fashion clothings with over 4,700 stores worldwide. They specialize in producing cheap fashion products with reasonable quality for women, men, and children.the company has a significant online presence, with online shopping available in 45 countries and still expanding. The purpose of the online stores is to attract more sales as the footfall in physical stores decreased. Competitor analysis According to H&M full year report, their competitors includes other affordable fashion apparel retailers such as Zara, Gap, Uniqlo, Topshop, and Forever 21. These competitors have similar marketing strategies as H&M, they all target the market segment of upper middle class by delivering branded name associated with their products.
Usability Testing After spending some time on the H&M website, I set a goal for myself to buy a full outfit and went through the process as a customer to test out the pain points and happy points in the website. The H&M website overall has a good affordance as what an e- commerce website should look like. They also applied Gestalt principles, such as proximity, similarity, figure/ground, visual hierarchy. The groupings of items and spacings were nicely executed, this allows users to easily separate the categories visually and navigate through the website. Although I think that there are more pain points than happy points,
Pain Points During my online shopping process, I located a couple pain points that I would like to address. While browsing through the women category, I thought the Shop now button was simply a hover state; however, that was not the case. It was actually a pop-up of the product without having the user click to go back everytime you clicked in to see more, which was a happy point for me afterward. The pain point was that I did not know that after 30 minutes of usage, it would have saved me a lot of time browsing back and forth. I would suggest changing the unclear Shop now button to Quick look, simply because shop now does not imply any context of a pop-up.
After I selected an item I wanted to purchase, I selected a size and add it to my cart. As you can see in the image on the right, it looks like that I ve selected size 0, but in fact, I ve selected size 4. The color grey on size 0 depicts that it is sold out; however, it can still be selected which I thought was not useful. I would suggest to have an X on size 0 and have a bold and clearer state for the selected size.
As I move on to checkout, I find this page very wordy/lengthy and not frontloaded. I would not see the promo code for free shipping if I was not doing this assignment and tried to read microcopy. They should prioritize what they want their customer see on their website, in order to attract customers to buy more clothes. The promo code should be right in their face so that it could tempt them to buy more. My suggestion for this problem would be to shorten up the sentence into one concise sentence and make it more visible for the user to read, maybe a banner or a pop-up.
Happy Points Firstly, the filter is very detailed. It can filter down to clothes sizes, shoe sizes, and colors. This could save users time searching for a specific type of clothing that they want. This can also filter down the clothes without your size, so users aren't looking at clothes that do not fit them.
Secondly, the add to favorite button is very clear when clicked. I have encountered websites in the past where it does not have an obvious state to show users that it was already added. This may seems little, but It can be very frustrating when it is not there when you need it. Last by not the least, having the ability to see the available colors of the clothing without having to click on the item is a major time saver. It allows users to shop more rather than spending unnecessary time navigating back and forth the website.
Overall Analysis Clear H&M s clarity is mediocre, their organization of the website is good; however, their wordings can be more straightforward. Concise Their level of consciousness is rather low, especially during checkout. They should write in a style that s efficient and direct. Useful The level of usefulness is average. H&M s checkout page does not clearly direct users and it would affect the checkout process. As an e-commerce website, the checkout page should be clear and direct for users to easily complete their order.
Empathy I would rate their empathy very low, they do not feel with people. For example, the results of skort were automatically adjusted to shorts, which was not what I wanted. Not only they did not show empathy and did not inform the user they do not sale skorts. Brand Voice H&M s brand voice leans towards serious. They do not have any wit or humor on their website, which may be due to that they want to seem like a high fashion designer company.
References H & M Hennes & Mauritz AB Full-year Report." H&M Group Reports. Accessed May 26, 2018. https://about.hm.com/en/media/news/financial-reports/ 2018/1/2803946.html.