SoftwareKeep

Simplified and humanized the complex online software shopping experience.

Duration: 4 years in total (2 years in UX/UI & Front-end development)
Role: Ux/UI Designer | Front-end developer

Project Summary

SoftwareKeep as a software wholesaling e-commerce company, to compete with brick and mortar stores like Microsoft and Best Buy or e-commerce titans like Amazon and Mychoicesoftware, they need to stand out and distinguish themselves by providing customer care with a unique personal touch with the support of a highly user-focused, accessible and functional website.

Multiple strategic and data-driven design and development work plan was carried out among a team of designers, developers and content writers to differentiate the brand while improving its overall UX.

The online software shopping experience was simplified and humanized, resulting in a 14% increase in sales and a 27% decrease in bounce rate.

Project Goals

• Simplify and humanize complex online software shopping experienceShopping software online can be complicated due to the different specs, compatibility and features. One of the missions of SoftwareKeep is to simplify the shopping process and humanize the experience to successfully gain trust from customers while guiding them through the seamless process from browsing to checkout.

• Establish a trustworthy brandSoftwareKeep as a B2B and B2C software wholesaler, needs to establish itself as a trustworthy brand to company software buyers and individual customers. Apart from offering software at a discount to attract customers, exhibiting and keeping its promises and guarantees to customers, having a secured and hassle-free checkout process and incorporating a reliable and helpful customer support system are also required to help customers build trust in the brand.

User Research Major Findings

According to similarweb, its analysis provides the details of SoftwareKeep’s user demographics by gender, age and the geographic location that generates the most traffic to the website.

SoftwareKeep has significantly more male users (77.49%) than female users (22.51%).
25-34 is the dominant user age group (32.29%) of SoftwareKeep users. 18-24 and 35-44 are the 2nd (29.72%) and 3rd largest (18.15%) age groups.
SoftwareKeep gets the most traffic from the US market (87.95%). The rest of the traffic comes from Canada, UK and Australia.

Competitive Analysis Major Findings

Mychoicesoftware is listed as the number one competitor of SoftwareKeep in the similarweb analysis. The size of the company and the products they offer have a lot of resemblances; therefore, a competitive analysis was conducted between these two brands. As the project goal is to simplify the shopping experience, the three fundamental touch points (the navigation, product and cart page) in a user shopping flow are selected for comparison.

Navigation

SoftwareKeep has 6 menu items in the main menu while Mychoicesoftware has only 3. SoftwareKeep’s menu focuses on the types of products, while Mychoicesoftware one provides users the shortcuts to compare products or view discounted products. They both have a very extended mega menu.

Product page

SoftwareKeep offers multiple payment options, such as instant checkout with PayPal or debit/visa card on their product page. In contrast, Mychoicesoftware has the usual “add to cart” and a “buy it now” button that takes users directly to the checkout page.
Using Microsoft Office Home & Business 2019 product page as an example, SoftwareKeep offers the option to switch between the PC and Mac version pages, while Mychoicesoftware offers to select the PC and Mac versions in a dropdown on the same product page and switches between Home and Business and Home and Student 2019 pages. Mychoicesoftware allows users to select the quantity, while SoftwareKeep doesn’t have that option on the product page.
Mychoicesoftware provides a more visual product overview that consists of image and text content, while SoftwareKeep only provides text descriptions and specs of the product.

Cart page

The cart page of SoftwareKeep is an individual page, while the one in Mychoicesoftware is a side panel. Mychoicesoftware offers the “earn MCS reward” option in the cart panel, while SoftwareKeep emphasizes highlighting its secured checkout process and various payment options on the cart page.

User Persona

Design Solutions

Use of human faces to provoke positive emotions and increase familiarity

Eye-tracking research has shown that people are trained to focus on and pay greater attention to human faces on websites. In addition, from the standpoint of emotional design, a positive emotional engagement and impression would result in a positive user experience.

Use of illustrations to visualize contentThe essence of the design can be enhanced with the aid of illustrations. They can convey any moods or feelings present in the text or throughout the brand.

Use of images to make content more appealing and engagingWhen images accompany the practical text, it has a significantly higher chance of resonating with its readers over time. Visual aids can increase comprehension by up to 400% and are 60,000 times more quickly understood than text alone.

Incorporate multiple trust-building elementsTrust building in e-commerce is important because it would contribute to a generally positive sense of social commerce. It has a direct effect on customers' satisfaction.

Include multiple payment optionsFor the ease of online shopping and checkout, providing multiple payment options gives customers the freedom to choose their preferred payment method.

Mockups

Results

By actively implementing the design solutions to optimize the user experience, the customer satisfaction rate had improved significantly, as reflected by the number of positive video reviews received and 5 stars rating in Trustpilot. The online software shopping experience was simplified and humanized, resulting in a 14% increase in sales and a 27% decrease in bounce rate. The site launch process had also accelerated 50% by using the Agile approach.