American Gas Lamp Works
Behavioral Analytics | Information Architecture | Experience Design | Interaction Design
American Gas Lamp Works Shopping Redesign
American Gas Lamp Works had a problem. Their lamps weren’t selling online and with a large trade show in the coming weeks, they couldn’t afford to leave their site with issues.
The Problem
American Gas Lamp Works (AGL) needed their site’s improvement designed and coded in 4 days, and had a limited budget which meant no time for substantive research.
The Approach
With no budget or time for research, I chose to review their page level analytics to hopefully find patterns in user abandonment, time spent on page, URLs visited, and most visited pages.
I also created an account with AGL to order and customize products on their site. I still get marketing emails from AGL to this day.
The Findings
The analytics showed a significant number of users abandoned their tasks early in the customization flow. I also noticed a strangely named URL appearing frequently in the page listings, which turned out to be the Create an Account and Login page.
Hands on experience expanded upon what I saw in the analytics. The Create an Account and Login page appeared after each choice in the customization flow. There was also no clear indication on product pages or in the customization flow to indicate how many different choices the user had to make.
Finally, users had no way to tell how many steps were required to complete customization or where they were in the flow.
The Work
Based on my use of the site, I redesigned the product page template to show the available customizable choices
I also redesigned the customization userflow and page layouts to show how many steps there are in the process and where the user was.
I also recommended AGL reduce the number of options in the future to reduce steps and limit decision fatigue.
Based on the analytics, I recommended moving the Create an Account and Login page to follow the customization process.
The Results
AGL saw less user abandonment from the customization process and more use of their online customization tool. They also have reduced their customization flow to a single page, but kept large parts of the redesign.
