Common Us Research Plan

Problem

CommonUs**:** Commonus‘s current website is out of date and unable to reach their customers online because their weak digital present. Their website at the moment doesn’t meet customer’s demand which is online shopping. Thus, they want to transform their brand by offering an e-commerce responsive website.

Background

Common Us was founded in 1994 and has been a successful offline store with over 400 physical stores in 32 countries. They offer a wide range of choices and categories in terms of styles for both male, female and kids. Their target audiences are those who have budget-minded and look for low-cost clothing for any occasion. Their main goal is to make any type of clothing accessible to everyone.

Research Goal

  1. We want to know the experience such as how user’s feel and think about shopping at Common Us physical store so that we can explore and design features which could bring them the similar excitement when they do online shopping. In case they provided negative feedback, we can get insight to ensure online shopping address their concerns.
  2. We want to learn user’s behavior, emotions including pain points, motivations when they purchase products online especially with fashion items so that we can gain grounded understanding of user journey then we can design the usable, useful and desirable website by offering necessary features, optimized processes.

Research Objectives

  1. Identify user’s problems, motivations when shopping at physical store.
  2. Identify user’s paint points, motivations when they shop online at other e-commerce stores.
  3. Understand what are the actual needs of users when it comes to online shopping. Have better understanding on shopping user’s shopping habit in both in-person and online store.
  4. Determine a user flow for an online clothing store. Decide on which functions, features is a must have, which is a nice to have.
  5. Address initial assumptions, biases such as target user’s demographic, shopping behaviors.
  6. Find out what trends e-commerce competitors are following.

Research Questions

  1. How does user feel when shopping at physical store and how is this feeling compare with online experience? How do user think we could fix that gap? (whether X features is helpful?)
  2. What challenges/frustrations does user face with when shopping online/ shop at stores?
  3. Is there any way in which user feel these challenges could be resolved?
  4. Which factors motivate/inspire user when shopping online?