Purple Mattress - Kids Accessories
🗓 Feb 2021. This was a discovery project spanning one week
👥 Customer-facing
📱 Mobile web
🎨 Me (UX Designer), Product Manager, Site Merchandiser
🔧 Made a recommendation to the business but nothing was built
😑 Problem: Customers are unaware that Purple sells kids products.
Image: Some screenshots of Purple’s kid collection page
Context
Purple is an American comfort technology company. It specializes in the direct-to-consumer sale of mattresses, seat cushions, back cushions, pillows, and platform bases. Purple also offers kids mattresses and accessories such as: kids sheets, pillows, and mattress protectors.
Image: Child laying on Purple Mattress. Many customers don’t know that Purple also offers kids products.
Why the exploration?
Opportunity: Understand if customers did not know about the kids accessories, or if they simply did not want/like the products themselves.
Based on previous customer research, we knew that if a customers interacts with Purple product in some way, they are significantly more likely to come back and buy higher-priced items, such as our premium mattresses.
If people did not know about kids accessories, we were missing out on a opportunity to expose customers to Purple’s unique GelFlex Grid.
Image: Purple’s GelFlex Grid. This is what sets them apart from other mattresses.
Testing
To test our assumption that customers do not know that Purple sells kid’s accessories, we used usertesting.com and performed 7 unmoderated tests. All participants had recently purchased a mattress for a child online. We wanted to know:
What’s their general awareness of the kid’s accessories?
Can they organically discover the kid’s accessories?
How do they interact with kid’s accessories?
After the sessions were complete, I went through and synthesized the interviews and uncovered some
common themes.
Image: Screenshot of spreadsheet used to synthesize unmoderated tests.
What we learned
1. The illustrations were distracting participants from other content on the page. Participants made comments such as:
“…the illustrations are distracting...”
“the images cater to children.... but children won’t be buying these online.”
“I can’t see any detail of the product because of the creepy monsters...”
Image: Some screenshots of Purple’s kid collection page with red boxes highlighting product imagery and illustrations.The unique illustrations seem to do more harm than good through my research.
2. Most participants had confusion with the different types of mattress on this page. Some sentiment included:
What’s the difference between the kids mattress and just the purple mattress?
How do I decide between the different mattresses?
Images: Screenshots of Purple’s kid mattress and the Purple Mattress. Customers were more familiar and comfortable shopping for a twin mattress when shopping for kids. Thus, “kid mattress” caused confusion.
3. Many participants were searching for “full/twin” mattress, not “kids mattress”.
4. Few participants noticed “Shop the Kid Collection” section upon scrolling through the page.
5. Most participants mentioned the importance of pillows, even for kids.
6. Almost no one said they would pay more than $60 for kids sheets.
Audit and recommendations
I performed an audit of other products to see what comparable patterns already existed. One that I found and liked was Patagonia Kids.
Image: Screenshot of Patagonia kids online site. I was inspired by their kids collection and UI patterns.
After exploring some other product experiences, as well as identifying some key pain points, we began exploring some small changes that we could test, as well as some long-term solutions-
Recommendations
Remove illustrations
Rework copy so there is less text
Explore naming other than “kids mattress”. Some ideas:
“Twin Mattress for kids”
“Twin/Full Mattress for Teens”
Explore Information architecture + Horizontal Scroll for each category
List pillows before sheets wherever the kids accessories are being listed
Next steps
A/B test illustrations
A/B test switching positions of “Shop Kid Collection”
Additional research: What are adults looking for in kids accessories? Are there key terms we should be using?
Final thoughts
Further discovery will need to be conducted. As of 04/15/21 we have launched and A/B test for the accessories position and are awaiting results mid-May.
This was my first time creating and running unmoderated users tests. I learned to always do a run-through as a tester yourself beforehand. By doing this, I was able to identify places where some of my questions didn’t make sense. We want the participants to feel as comfortable as possible.
Overall, this was a fun project, and I look forward to seeing what else we can do to create impact through the kids products.