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I have omitted confidential information in this case study. All information in this case study is my own and does not necessarily reflect the views of FabKids.

 
 
You can’t practice design genuinely without having done your research
— Erika Hall
 
 

So, How’s Slow?

We learned from customer reviews and Google Analytics that some of our key conversion pages were loading unexceptionally slow, ranging from 8 seconds on shoes shopping page to 15 seconds on post registration page that display all shoes and outfits images.

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The Research

Before moving head-on into the design phase, I gave my assessment on the load/ performance issues and recommendations on how to improve the wait-time experience, first by defining the areas for the deep-dive research:

  • What are the different mobile and desktop trends?

  • What are general user expectations?

  • What are those most-engaged elements on slow loading pages based on heat maps and click maps?

  • What are the different loading solutions?

As a team, we did our best to diagnose potential performance problems on a page and as the UX designer, my prime role was to be the advocate for optimizing the perceived experience, by adhering to the following rule:

Time is measured objectively but perceived subjectively, and experiences can be engineered to improve perceived performance.
 
 

Recommendations

After presenting the research and recommendations with the product team, we broke the project down into three key parts:

 

Impact

As a result of solutions that address the site speed inefficiencies, page load decrease from 14 seconds to 3 seconds and a 5% increase in site conversion on impacted areas. With our confidence reinforced by trial execution, we rolled out these new features to all users after two weeks of A/B testing.