Case Study:
Streamlining Selling Features for Online Homeschool Book Service
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Hoot - A Business on a Mission
I’m working to make the process of selling books easier and faster, and the process of buying books simpler and cheaper for homeschooling parents. It matters because homeschooling parents are extremely busy and often quite overwhelmed--I’d like to help make educating their children at home less difficult because it's such a worthwhile mission.
But Hoot Had a Problem...
Hoot's selling features were bloated with unnecessary functionality, were confusing for customers to use, and had been proven difficult for users to navigate.
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This frustrates users, making them feel dumb and helpless and wastes their time.
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Issues like these can lead to a loss of customers for the business. Additionally, this is embarrassing for the business as their technology reflects poorly on them.
Ultimately this meant that everyone lost, no one won, and another support for the homeschooling community fell flat.
To solve it, Hoot decided to work with me.e
I trusted Melanie to be honest with me in regards to what could and couldn’t be done. I trusted her to not ditch me or the project without a word and because after growing up together I got to see first hand over two decades how hardworking and intelligent she is. Melanie is extremely dedicated to what she decides to work on, and to people. She is kind, but not so soft that she can't deliver bad news.
So I came up with a plan...
1
Getting to Know Hoot
INTAKE
Defined our objective - solve the problem by:
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Increasing Usefulness and Lean Design:
To pair down functionality so that users can easily do the processes that are most important, easily find other processes in other parts of the website that may still be useful, and eliminating those that are not useful to avoid overwhelming the user.
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Increasing Usability:
Make sure the features fall in line with an intuitive natural user flow for the main target audience. This mostly means making frequent and important features visible and tucking other semi useful features into other parts of the website.
2
Research
Home schoolers and Website
Audit the Website
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Study the Target Audience
Homeschooling moms that have varied lifestyles but overlapping values:
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Independent/Strong Values
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Family focused
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Cost conscious
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Involved in their communities
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Larger than average families
Putting these together revealed our unmet needs and paint points
Feeling Overwhelmed with Unknowns
What to write for shipping and return policy
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Poor Usability
Posting a Book is difficult and takes a long time
Unmet Informational Needs
Cannot find product drafts or items that need to shipped
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No Effective “Main Hub” for user activity
No main area of the site to monitor for updates
3
Design
Deal with paint points and unmet needs
BEFORE
Example with Seller's Dashboard
AFTER
Example with Seller's Dashboard
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4
implement
Make it happen!
In Progress This is where we are now!
As a result, Hoot has peace of mind
No more user complaints about selling features
Better experiences for their customer
and positive impressions of their services