From Discovery to Purchase: Improving the User Experience for Buyers in eCommerce

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From Discovery to Purchase:

Improving the User Experience for Buyers in eCommerce

JASPER HAHN

K T H R O Y A L I N S T I T U T E O F T E C H N O L O G Y

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From Discovery to Purchase

Improving the User Experience for Buyers in eCommerce

JASPER HAHN

Stockholm 2015

Software Engineering of Distributed Systems School of Information and Communication Technology

Kungliga Tekniska Högskolan

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Abstract

The Internet has revolutionized many areas of our lives. New forms of exchanging and retrieving information, making business and communication in general have been made possible with the Internet and have gone through a rapid development since its creation. In an age of nearly ubiquitous access to the Internet and a majority of the western world actively using social media, retail markets have changed, too. But compared to the rapidly changing services in other sectors, retail businesses have only converted an existing model to a new technology rather than coming up with a new one. Social Commerce is an approach that wants to change that. It takes into account lessons learned from social media and shifting marketing strategies and tries to create a better shopping experience for customers while giving brands and fashion influencers a new platform to engage with them. This thesis project uses literature from different fields such as interaction design, online marketing and fashion along with user interviews to identify the most important aspects that will lead towards a more social online shopping experience, particularly in fashion. It is conducted in collaboration with the local start-up Apprl (www.apprl.com) and includes an implementation part of realizing the identified most promising features as part of the agile development process within the company. The field of social commerce is promising to radically change the way we buy things online and Apprl is one of many examples trying to make that happen.

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Sammanfattning

Internet har revolutionerat många områden av våra liv. Nya former för utbyte och hämtning av information, att göra affärer och kommunikation generellt har blivit möjligt med Internet och har gått igenom en snabb utveckling sedan sitt skapande. I en tid med nästan allestädes närvarande tillgång till Internet och en majoritet av människor i västvärlden som aktivt använder sociala medier har också detaljhandelsmarknaden ändrats. Men jämfört med de snabbt ändrande tjänsterna i andra branscher har detaljhandelsmarknaden bara konverterat en redan existerande modell till en ny teknologi istället för att hitta på en ny. Social Commerce är ett tillvägagångssätt som vill ändra detta. Det tar hänsyn till erfarenheter från sociala medier och skiftande marketingstrate- gier och försöker att skapa en bättre shoppingupplevelse för kunder medan det ger varumärken och modepåverkare en ny plattform att engagera sig i. Detta examensarbete använder litteratur från olika områden som interaktionsdesign, online marketing och mode tillsammans med använ- darintervjuer för att identifiera de viktigaste aspekterna som vill leda mot en mer social online shoppingupplevelse, speciellt för mode. Arbetet är genomfört i samverkan med det lokala startup- företaget Apprl (www.apprl.com) och inkluderar en implementeringsdel där de funktioner som har blivit identifierade som mest lovande realiseras som en del av den agila utvecklingsprocessen hos företaget. Området för Social Commerce är lovande för att radikalt ändra sättet vi köper saker online och Apprl är ett av många exempel på företag som försöker att få detta att hända.

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List of Figures

1 Customer Journey . . . 4

2 Idea Matrix . . . 16

3 Latest Looks Tab . . . 21

4 Liked Looks Tab . . . 21

5 eMail Template Comparison . . . 23

6 Notification UI . . . 24

7 Evaluation: Latest and Friends Looks . . . 37

8 Evaluation: eMail Redesign . . . 39

9 Mockup: Notepad . . . 51

10 Mockup: Black Frame . . . 52

11 Mockup: Look Slotmachine . . . 53

12 Quantified Results . . . 54

13 Additional Comparison: Latest and Friends Looks . . . 55

14 Product Sale eMail . . . 56

15 Comparison of Tracking Services . . . 57

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List of Tables

1 Overview of Feature Ideas . . . 30 2 Detailed eMail Click Rates . . . 38

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1 Introduction

The Internet has influenced our society and significantly changed how we perform common tasks.

Digital messages exchanged on the Internet overtook traditional mail in relevance a long time ago and today fewer people even call others on their phones than just a few years ago. In fact, those who make calls are more and more likely to place those over the Internet instead of using a plain old phone number. Meanwhile, students would be at a complete loss if they had to do their homework assignments without having access to the Internet. Even the software tools we use are starting to be in the cloud instead of locally run applications.

However, while our lives are certainly heavily influenced by our online activities, not all parts of our lives have seen the same improvements by the use of technology. Certain behavioral patterns have almost exclusively shifted into digital - think about taking photos with your phone or streaming music to your tablet - other common interactions have stayed true to their traditional, physical nature at least for major parts of society. Even other activities were merely adapted to new technologies without seeing decisive changes in the way they are carried out.

One of those adapted activities that virtually everyone engages in is shopping. Online stores basically operate with the same model that has been used by mail order businesses for decades.

The catalogs and newsletters merely moved from the physical mailbox to a web site and your eMail inbox. Shopping as a spare time activity rather than a chore is especially relevant for clothing or fashion as the corresponding industry wants consumers to refer to their products [1]. Clothing has long since evolved from its utilitarian purpose to a statement. No matter whether you only buy a new pair of pants to replace a broken pair or you have a closet overflowing with clothes some of which still have the price tags on, we all have an idea of what the specific garment should look like to properly present ourselves the way we want to be seen. Everyone has that certain idea about their preferred style when they walk into a store. But wait a minute! Walk into a store?

Yes, that is indeed still happening. Brick-and-mortar stores are struggling with competition from online stores but they are not likely to vanish any time soon.

Living in a time of social networks and practically ubiquitous access to the Internet, our social interactions might be transforming but they still have a grave influence on our behaviors as members of society and likewise our behaviors as customers. Harnessing the meaning of social interaction for business is not a staggeringly new idea, as masses of literature about social media marketing suggest. However, a true integration of the process of shopping for clothes with the social interactions we willfully engage in has yet to become a common pattern. Social commerce, identified as a trend e.g. by Wall Street Journal in 2011 [2], may not be replacing traditional marketing models but it is destined to become more influential in the near future; understanding it and adapting to it offers opportunities for business and customers alike. Some business models may, however, become obsolete along the way as they are neither robust enough nor adapting to new realities that value personal recommendations over direct advertising.

Apprl is a distinguished example of a business built around the idea of social commerce. Based in Stockholm, the young start-up has been elected the 14th-hottest start-up in Sweden by the ranking on internetworld.se¹ in late 2014 [3]. More recently Apprl was awarded as “Best Service Within Social Shopping” in Sweden [4]. The company is still small, but constantly spreading its reach.

This thesis presents the existing services and explore a vision for the future based on input directly from existing or prospective users of Apprl’s services. The first steps towards that future, both theoretical and practical, were taken during the course of the thesis.

1http://internetworld.se/

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1.1 Goal

Building on existing ideas around social commerce, the practical part of this thesis was meant to develop, or rather contribute to, a promising approach to making online shopping more social.

Valuable background research and active exploration of user needs were to be used as a solid basis for the carried out work. The resulting features would be available to the public on Apprl’s existing platform and could thus be used by a vast number of users. Even though economic success was not a primary goal of the thesis, improving the experience users have on the social commerce platform is likely to be beneficial for the company as well as their users. Along with the exemplary development for this one particular platform, the findings and considerations described throughout this report is supposed to give useful insights into what has been, is and might be happening along the the lines of a shift towards being more social in eCommerce as well as online marketing.

In addition to the mentioned outcomes, the process applied during planning as well as development shows an example of small-team software development projects and thus contributes to the field of software engineering by describing a realistic work environment for software projects.

It can be useful as a reference for setting up software projects or serve as guidance for soon-to-be graduates of the field or others planning a career in the field.

1.2 Scope

Using a real-world application as a basis for this thesis is an interesting topic for observation in itself. The project work carried out was a study of everyday life and work in a Swedish start-up as much as it was an analysis of and active contribution to the future eCommerce. Throughout this report, the supervising company plays an important role which can be seen as exemplary for the tech start-up scene in Sweden. Practical and theoretical work lie close together in the field of software engineering which makes the intersection a rather interesting topic for observation.

1.3 Thesis Structure

This thesis starts out with a more detailed introduction to the current state of eCommerce, fashion and their interconnection in particular in chapter 2. Furthermore the chapter introduces the object of contemplation: the services offered by Apprl. It is rounded off with some insights into further reading and related projects. The first phase of the project work is detailed in chapter 3; it describes the process of gathering information and analyzing the findings which is essential for the main contribution of the thesis that is covered in the subsequent chapters. The findings were used to gather feedback in interview sessions which aree described and analyzed in chapter 3. The concepts for changes are outlined in chapter 4 before giving an insight into the development process in which the results were converted into actual code for the existing platform in chapter 5.

The main contribution of this work in the mentioned chapters. The contribution consists of several additions and refinements to the services of Apprl which are used to exemplify the possible future of eCommerce in a real world setting. Those results are briefly evaluated and an outlook for future development is given as an additional contribution in chapter 6 before a summary of findings and contributions is made in the concluding chapter 7.

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2 Background

For a general overview in the areas of fashion, marketing, online shopping and fashion blogging, this chapter covers the most important aspects of with an emphasis on their intersection. Over the course of two weeks, the existing service, related research and other opportunities were studied in detail. Additional literature helped getting more insights and the gathered knowledge from different research areas was used to generate useful input for the subsequent process of improving the experience on Apprl.com. Information provided here helps better understand considerations made throughout the rest of the thesis.

Some initial thoughts that could evolve into feature ideas served as useful outlines and were documented along the way and used for the following process described in chapter 3 .

2.1 eCommerce and Fashion today

Some key terms that are useful for the understanding of the field are explained here. Since this thesis is carried out in the field of IT, theoretical deliberations are kept to a minimum.

2.1.1 Customer Journey

The basic steps of a user’s online shopping process were identified as the customer journey which is depicted in figure 1. The customer journey describes the different steps and phases a customer passes through during her interaction with a business in the context of shopping. On this rather coarse level three stages can be identified: discovery, consideration and purchase. The term "customer journey" has traditionally been used to describe the actual movement of a customer in a store and various adaptions, often a lot more elaborate than the one used here, have been proposed [5]. For the given context the depicted model serves as a solid basis for discussion.

Customers in fashion are more likely to buy again in the near future than customers for example in the housing market or people buying a car. Fashion is outdated quickly and even more importantly the barrier to owning more instead of simply replacing a piece is very low. Fashion buyers want to express themselves through what they buy and wear. Cassidy et al. for example analyzed the motivation to buy fashion for youth in particular [6]. The incentive to dress well and show appreciation for new trends can be based on personality traits or simply be a form of complying to social norms, as explained by R. Michon et. al [7].

The market for fashion, one can conclude, is thus broad and steadily moving. This particular observation calls for the consideration of one very important aspect of the customer journey: the post-purchase experience. Building a relationship with a customer means more than just selling one product. Returning customers are what keeps a business alive and growing and only satisfied consumers will become loyal to a brand or business. Both retailers and brands have an interest in engaging users after a purchase is made, to build up loyalty. D. Court et. al identified the importance of this aspect in what they refer to as the loyalty loop [8]. Loyalty of customers is categorized into lazy and active loyalty by D. Court et. al , with only the latter ensuring a strong, lasting relationship with a customer.

Projected onto the case of Apprl, 3 out of 4 phases of the customer journey are supported through the existing services. During the course of the thesis, the importance of the different phases are identified and corresponding strategies for improvement are presented.

2.1.2 Personal Recommendations

The importance of personal recommendations has always been high. Its availability, however, has risen dramatically over the course of the last years with the emergence of social networks and other

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Figure 1: The different phases a customer goes through during (online) shopping.

modern communication channels. Marketers refer to personal recommendations as word-of-mouth or earned media and the industry has identified them as the most influential factor in the decision- making process of today’s consumers. The global information and measurement company Nielsen² frequently publishes reports about consumers’ trust and the influence of different channels on their buying behavior. Subsequent reports on trust in earned media have shown a steady increase over the years [9, 10]. Nielsen’s analysis consistently places the influence of earned media above that of conventional advertising, also referred to as owned media. Owned media describes all kinds of advertising space or air time paid for by companies such as TV commercials or banner ads on websites. Another marketing analyst firm, Crowdtap³, identified customers’ primary influence for buying presents during the Christmas season of 2014 and found that two thirds of shoppers valued recommendations on social networks the highest [11].

In short, consumers are interested in other people’s opinions about products and actively eval- uate choices based on that input.

On a related note, a lot of research has been conducted on automated recommendation systems ([12, 13, 14, 15, 16]). Some even focused on fashion [17, 18]. However, this thesis and the philosophy of Apprl value the personal aspect a lot higher than automated "pseudo-personalization". Recom- mendations are part of the experience, but the social connections were deemed more relevant than the recommendation of individual products for the time being. The entire field of recommendation systems is thus not analyzed in more detail.

Traditionally, fashion has been a field in which few leaders or innovators inspire other people and cause a trickle-down effect from fashion enthusiasts down to the mainstream markets as explained by Barnes [19].

2.1.3 Fashion Blogs

Taking one step back from recommendations by personal peers, the role of certain influencers can be identified as highly relevant for consumers. Barnes take on social media’s relevance for the fashion industry identifies a change in who those influencers are in the field of fashion [19]; while it used to be a domain of fashion journalists, it has shifted towards fashion bloggers as the primary source of input for consumers with a special interest in fashion.

Along with the rise of fashion bloggers, online communities have been built around fashion and shown a significant impact on consumer behavior. Studies have adapted the community idea towards the blogosphere and its readership. For example in 2014 Pihl identified the question "[...]

how communities forming around sets of brands, rather than a brand, can be explained."[20]. His

2http://www.nielsen.com/

3http://corp.crowdtap.com/

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results state that beyond "appreciation" and "loyalty", the readers of fashion blogs also develop a sense of "close relation" to their favorite bloggers. Pihl’s findings prove how influential fashion bloggers are in the region in which he carried out his research. That region happens to be Sweden, the same country this thesis and Apprl’s biggest part of operations are carried out in. Taking into account recent viewer statistics, the influence of Swedish fashion bloggers remains high. As of March 2015, the top 10 professional blogs are all beyond 100.000 readers per week and even 8/10 private blogs are exceeding that number, according to Bloggportalen[21], Sweden’s biggest service for blog rankings.

2.1.4 Mobile Phones and Shopping

Retailers across all sectors have noticed a rise in mobile phone usage inside their stores in recent years. Mobile users tend to compare prices and buy online with their always-connected phones.

But that doesn’t necessarily mean the death of brick-and-mortar stores according to recent studies by McKinsey [22] and UPS [23]. A recent study found that 56% of shoppers are using their phones to research products online, yet 58% end up buying at the brick-and-mortar store eventually [22];

the negative impact might thus be less severe than store owners may intuitively guess. McKinsey’s report does, however, point out that including the mobile segment into one’s strategy is not straight- forward and has cost a lot of retailers big amounts of money for very disappointing results. They provide some positive examples as well and one of the main take-aways is this: buyers don’t want more apps, they want a convenient experience which is likely best delivered by the means of a well-optimized mobile website.

On- and offline shopping go hand-in-hand. Giving consumers tools that can combine both practices will be important in the future and one should at least be aware of this co-existence when considering fashion consumers and their experience.

2.1.5 Affiliate Marketing

The term affiliate marketing described the marketing practice of paying per generated sale instead of a fixed rate or a rate of impressions or clicks. Back in 2006 Duffy analyzed its benefits over the other mentioned payment models [24]. He describes the concept as a "win-win relationship"

because all involved parties benefit from the same triggered user behavior. Affiliate links can be placed on different places of a website or within eMail marketing. Although technically possible, the payment model is not usually paired with banner ads or other purely commercial content.

Successful uses of affiliate market often rely on more personal and/or relevant combinations of primary content and linked products or services. Examples include tech bloggers linking to a smart phone they reviewed or a fashion blogger linking to the dress she is wearing in the picture she posted.

2.2 Apprl

As briefly introduced in chapter 1 Apprl specializes in making eCommerce social, also referred to as social commerce. The business is built around the idea that content created by peers to which a user has a personal relation is many times more meaningful that conventional advertising in the form of banner ads.

The service is built around two main principles:

• Engaging fashion bloggers with the service and supporting their creation of high quality content, providing income for both the bloggers and Apprl iself through affiliate marketing.

Bloggers can sign up on Apprl to become publishers in order to start earning money.

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• Providing a social platform for users and bloggers to interact with products and each other through creation of and communication about content.

As of the start of this thesis, the first principle had been the focus of operations. There are, however, intersections between these two goals in terms of features of the service, which is subject to the investigation throughout this thesis. Several ways of curating and creating content which can then be displayed on other channels are the core features of Apprl. Those main principles are outlined briefly.

Content Creation Users can use product images to create content called looks. The available kinds of looks are tagged photos or collages of product photos. For either one the user can interact with looks in the form of clicking shown products to buy them or finding similar items through an overlay that appears when hovering over the products (or touching them on mobile devices).

Content Curation In addition to actively creating looks, all products liked by a user are collected within her personal store page. Additionally, curated stores can be created manually to only showcase a certain selection of products. (Remark: the curation feature had been scheduled and was introduced shortly after work on this thesis started)

Embedding Content on Blogs Looks or entire shops, based on products a user has liked (see be- low), can be embedded into other websites such as blogs. The required HTML code is automatically generated and does not require technical skills from the user.

Shopping Users can browse the vast amount of products that is aggregated from different online retailers who are part of the Apprl network. Search and filter options help the user to navigate and find products. The same applies for content a user finds embedded on third party websites.

Social Interaction Users (both regular and publishers) can interact on apprl.com. Looks can be published for other users to see and their individual stores can be accessed. Users can follow other users and like products or looks. Liked products automatically show up in a user’s personal store.

Sharing Content on Other Channels Other social networks can be used to share content or products created on apprl.com. This way, fashion-minded users on Apprl can communicate their style further beyond the scope of Apprl’s user base.

2.3 Additional Reading: Fashion, Commerce and Online User Experiences

The background reading and preparation covered a vast amount of different fields and while some literature was mainly used to get a better understanding of the required fields, a lot of resources provide information that has been used throughout the work and writing of this thesis.

An inspiring read that definitely challenged the way certain problems were thought about was

"Seductive Interaction Design" by S. P. Anderson [25]. As will become clear in chapter 4, few changes were actually made concerning the interaction. The insights from this book have played their fair part in re-considering certain drastic changes other literature might have enthusiastically recommended because it laid out psychological reasoning for design aspects that went well beyond

"looking pretty". A very thorough analysis of fashion blogging, especially in Sweden, has been conducted by C. Pihl from the School of Business at Stockholm University [20]. His insights are valuable to better classify the role of fashion in our society. A few inspirations for feature ideas, especially about motivation, loyalty and gamification were based on understandings gained by

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reading Loyalty 3.0 by R. Paharia[26] and Y. Chou’s Actionable Gamification [27] respectively.

Both books take a rather analytic approach to the topic and explain the why instead of only giving suggestions about how to apply their principles. The reports and analysis articles by both McKin- sey and Nielsen were helpful resources and often inspired further reading beyond the scope of this thesis. Topics as the mentioned importance of personal recommendations are best understood and most valuable when looking at statistics they provide rather than predictions without supporting data as referenced in section 2.1.2. For the general importance of social media it is important to recall how many people are actively using it today. Numbers from The Swedish Internet Infras- tructure Foundation show that 47% of Sweden’s population is using Facebook daily and 95% in the age group 16-25 is at least using it sometimes [28].

2.4 Related Products and Services

By now the reader should have an overview of the underlying motivations for creating products that focus on fashion, online shopping, social commerce or related topics. In fact, the marketplace for online services and mobile applications has seen huge interest in the area and identifying all relevant and competing concepts would be far beyond the scope of this thesis. However, this section presents a few hand-picked examples of tools that use the dynamics identified earlier on. The list is not supposed to be complete but tries to be as representative as possible for the existing market and relevance for Apprl’s own target audience.

2.4.1 Closetspace

A very large and successful service is Closetspace [29]. Their service is based on offering ready- made "looks" that include links for buying the displayed products but they can also be saved for later once the user signed up. Closetspace is the main product of a company called Stylitics, based in New York City. Their main business strategy is selling insights about customer behavior to brands and fashion outlets. The current offering on Closetspace includes a wider range of features and is supposed to serve as a "central hub" for fashion-oriented people. Users can catalog products they own in their digital wardrobe and get recommendations for looks based on what they already own; recommendations are even taking into account their local weather forecast. As an additional paid feature a personal stylist can be purchased on a per-month basis.

While the stated intent is to provide looks from fashion experts such as bloggers, the selection presented on the website is curated by brands or shops themselves and makes the impression of very generic collections of products whose sole unifying characteristic is the prominent placement of a certain product by that brand. Closetspace is not offering social interaction features such as friending or following other users. Revenue is solely generated for the company itself by means of selling items and users purchasing access to premium features.

2.4.2 Rêve

Solely focused around brands and products, the Rêve mobile apps for iOS and Android are built around a community principle similar to Apprl’s [30]. The start-up company is based in Stockholm and their product went live in May 2014. Rêve’s focus clearly lies on mobile but the company also offers a web-based version of their service. People are encouraged to comment on products and

"reve" them, which can be considered their version of the common "like". A clear differentiating factor is that the service unifies the concept of brands and shops. Nearly all brands are in fact connected to their own web shop with one notable exception being Zalando. The brand or shop logo is prominently placed next to each product unlike on Apprl’s service where the shop names are only mentioned in subtle text hints on product detail pages.

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While the general concept of buying products is comparable to that on Apprl, some shops have direct integration for the mobile applications. One encountered example was that H&M products could be ordered straight from the application. Other shops as well as all products clicked on Rêve lead to the shop websites exactly as they do on Apprl. All users are treated as customers only without any opportunities for creating content or even earning money. Content creation or curation features are not part of the service.

A Notable mention is that one of team member at Rêve, Xavi Gratal, is combining his work at the company with his PhD studies at KTH in the fields of computer vision and artificial intelligence.

2.4.3 Tipser

Also based in Stockholm, Tipser could be Apprl’s closest competitor [31]. Their service appears to replicate all features Apprl offers in an equally minimalist, yet different design. Based on an introduction video the user learns about the possibilities the service has to offer. The entire website is in Swedish and there does not seem to be any way to access information in English. Unlike the other services mentioned before Tipser is designed as an affiliate marketing platform for content creators such as bloggers (even though the term blogger is not specifically stated). The presented options for setting up one’s own store page are vast and suggest that putting up a shop should be the main priority for Tipser’s users. Embedding looks, in the form of tagged photos, is an option mentioned on the site but was not actually discovered during a brief investigation of the service.

The most notable differentiating feature is that Tipser offers a streamlined checkout process through their own site. Products are ordered directly on their site and Tipser handles all further transaction with the underlying retailers.

Trying to sign up for the service unfortunately resulted in an error message, written in Swedish, whenever trying to log in⁴. However, signing up through Facebook worked. The interface is designed around the same actions of exploring and liking as found on Apprl. However, it puts the emphasis on products instead of users. A feed of recently created shops exists but no looks or ways to follow other users were to be seen. There are no customization options and no pointers as to how one creates the actual shop. Once the button for generating the embed code was found and the code tried in a local file it could not load the store in a browser. According to the debug console in Chrome a certain "userid" was not found. Some of the additional features such as tagging products in photos seem to be exclusively supported in blogg.se. (Remark: One press release, discovered later, actually states that Tipser is geared towards blogg.se users. The actual web site does not state that at all.)

2.4.4 Shopsense

Shopsense [32] serves its’ users with access to a vast selection of products that can be used to create

"widgets" which can be embedded on other websites. The widgets can have logical layouts such as different grids and are highly configurable, yet not comparable to the collages Apprl offers as

"looks" due to the lack of creative freedom. Shopsense works like a traditional affiliate network but adds a lot of possibilities for dynamically creating different sizes and variations of their widgets. In addition to a highly polished and feature-rich interface and well-designed yet minimalist sharing content, Shopsense offers detailed statistics and simple analysis tools to track user earnings. While favorite products can be saved for a user’s account similar to the other presented services, no social interaction is possible. In fact, other users and their information can not be accessed at all.

Shopsense is the affiliate program to Shopstyle [33], which helps users create sleek looking stores based on products and brands they like but does not generate any income in itself.

4Tested on May 15th

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3 Identifying Opportunities

In order to produce relevant additions to the existing service later on it was necessary to apply a structured approach to the exploration and subsequent narrowing down of new ideas. After an initial broadening of the considered opportunities, they were grouped into promising areas and summarized into more meaningful ideas. Additional insight was gathered through interviews with existing and prospective users and eventually led to a final assessment of the initial ideas.

Throughout the rest of this chapter the background and fundamental opportunities are explained and the ideation process is described. Steps were taken according to their order of oc- currence, but details were added for clarification when necessary rather than in order of their inception.

3.1 Brainstorming and Inspiration

The process started out with a few ideas that had already come up during a meeting before the actual start of the thesis work. Those ideas were very general in nature and consisted of a broad range of possibilities from very small interface optimizations to actively aiding the user during the checkout process. Extensive reading for a better understanding of the field and the interaction with related services, both covered in the previous chapter, helped in the process of generating new ideas. Those ideas were collected and described very briefly to serve as basis for discussion between the author of this thesis and representatives of Apprl.

Considerations about which areas were starting points for several of the ideas serve as the guide through this section. It introduces the concepts that were identified as possible improvements for each individual area.

3.1.1 Facilitating the Shopping Process

One concern that came up during the initial conversations with Apprl was that the checkout process is known in the industry to be a very critical part of the shopping process. A study by KISSmetrics for example showed that in many cases more than 40% of the customers drop out after the first step of a checkout process and concluded that anything that makes checkout easier and/or faster has a significant impact on completion rates [34]. While Apprl is not an online store itself and thus does not control the checkout process, the business model is still based around finished purchases. One of the biggest hurdles for users that had been identified was the requirement to create an account or logging in to an existing one. Based on that a few ideas were designed around facilitating that process for users. These ideas included:

• Auto-Login: Store account information or build connections to stores and automatically log in users when they want to purchase.

• Registration/Checkout Aid: Keep certain information for the users such as shipping and billing information and offer a way to conveniently insert that information into the corresponding form without manual effort.

• Navigation Bar: Keep the familiar top bar from Apprl.com when users are sent to an external site, that could offer above features as well as navigation, liking the product or similar.

Along the way, other subtle adjustments to the actual purchase were considered that dealt with reducing steps required for the user. Only one parameter proved so essential for nearly all products that it was added to the list: the size for a garment. Not only does the user have to select a size

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once on the product page on retailer’s website, certain sizes might also be sold out, so that a user could filter out wrong sizes beforehand, when using the Apprl shop (on Apprl.com or embedded).

That information should then be passed on to the retailer to eliminate the need for size selection.

3.1.2 Motivation and Loyalty

A look at existing user statistics tells a clear story: usage drops a few months after users create their accounts. But how could that be? New features have constantly been added, the tools became more polished and the number of available products was not only steadily increasing, but also keeping up to date with upcoming trends. So how would we keep users engaged with the service for more than a few months? In addition to keeping up the initial motivation it seemed important to create loyalty towards the service. Section 2.1.1 identified a customer’s loyalty towards fashion brands as an important factor for marketers’ considerations. Here, however, we were looking at the loyalty towards Apprl.com as a product.

Initially, it is important to give the user a motivation to start using your service at all. There- after, the experience must appeal to the user. Just because you measured that a peer user can finish a given task in "under x seconds" you do not know whether given the opportunity the user would want to experience the interaction again. Giving users a positive experience is what really makes an online service successful.

Previous efforts by Apprl included competitions about look creation according to a certain topic or based on a brand. Those were mainly meant to attract new users to the platform and actually yielded positive results in that regard. However, each resulting spike in activity faded out within weeks after those special events had taken place.

The reason users were initially engaged when competitions were introduced is easy to understand. In efforts to create more pleasant experiences a lot of attention has been paid to the topic of gamification within recent years. Competitions are just one manifestation of applied gamification. After both successful and failed attempts at it have been made, approaches such as Chou’s Octalysis [35] are trying to outline the essence of what actually makes gamification useful. Being delighted by an experience is generally what it boils down to, not conventional game elements.

Anderson also touches on the topic and makes a valuable point in his chapter about "The Game of Seduction" when he writes:

A game first has to be fun and engaging - without the points and badges that get so much attention; a simple reward schedule - however addictive - leads to frustration if people don’t enjoy the activity being reinforced. In contrast, good games bring joy to people’s lives.

Why is it possible to spend hours transfixed on a screen with no awareness of the passing time? Why do people enjoy games? And can we create the same emotions with things that are not games? (S. P. Anderson, Seductive Interaction Design, p. 148 [25]) One needs to understand that a game in these terms does not necessarily have to be something we intuitively identify as such. It can be anything we enjoy doing. Anderson encourages designers and developers to find game-like characteristics inherent in an application before adding new features based on the gamification principles. Looking into what already made Apprl enjoyable to use as well as what might make it even more enjoyable were two very interesting questions for both the brainstorming and the interviews.

Improving the subjective joy a user experiences can be done in various ways. It is essential, however, that it fits into its context to achieve the desired goal. That might for example mean making a common task easier and more convenient to perform or sometimes simply putting a smile

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on someone’s face. Anderson refers to MailChimp’s⁵slightly rude little maskot and cites how only 0.007% of the users actually activated the "party pooper mode” that eliminated the seemingly unprofessional but certainly delightful remarks made by the maskot.

These principles had to be considered in regard to Apprl’s existing service and supported by findings detailed in the previous chapter, content creation, social interaction and shopping were deemed pleasant activities in themselves. These core features are of utmost importance for the service. It is however not trivial to add more exciting layers to the existing interaction without distracting from those main parts of the experience. Two important pieces to the puzzle are identified by Paharia as mastery and progress, the subjective feeling of a user that she improves and becomes better at something by means of achieving certain goals. Adding meaningful goals and honoring those in the right way is a delicate topic and has been considered with great caution.

It is not without reason that Chou’s book Actionable Gamification carries the subtitle Beyond Points, Badges, and Leaderboards. Thus, meaningful concepts are required in this area and the created ideas were meant to have exploratory character rather than being final concepts.

In addition to direct interaction, staying up to date with what other users are doing is very interesting for users. Reminding users about recent activities could increase their loyalty if it piques their interest. Prior to this thesis some very straight forward notifications were being sent out via eMail. Those notifications were solely text-based and thus carried little visual appeal. Notifying users could also serve as reminders to users who have started to forget the service and would thus benefit the experience in more than one way. In order for notifications to more accepted, though, their visual appeal had to be improved.

Concluding these deliberations, once a general motivation for using your product is ensured, it is important to keep that momentum up and keep your users excited over the long term; create loyalty. When measuring success of a website, sign-up rates are definitely an important indicator but long-term engagement is what keeps a business running. Looking at the activity rates of users and identifying what users seem to find motivating in the short and long term were identified as important areas for investigation during the feedback sessions. This excerpt describes some of the ideas that could serve as improvements in the areas of short- and long-term motivation:

• Unlocking features as reward for certain behavior (number of likes, amount of content created, etc.)

• Improved aesthetics of notifications/alerts (someone likes your content, an item is on sale, etc.)

• Bring notifications/alerts into the application in addition to eMails

• Useful and/or playful new features (see designs in Appendix A.4)

• Customizable shops⁶

• More features for look creation

• Notify when items are sold out, so that a look could not be completely purchased any more 3.1.3 Social Interaction

Apprl likes to refer to their services with the term social commerce. Unfortunately, at the time of starting this thesis Apprl had rather little to offer in terms of social interaction. The clear business

5http://mailchimp.com/

6Curated Shops and some customizability for embedded shops had already been scheduled without the author knowing about it at this stage. The concept was included in the subsequent feedback analysis nevertheless.

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goal had been to support publishers with their work and generate sales. Those publishers built their own fashion communities, as described in 2.1.3, and are using Apprl mainly as a tool and less as a platform. Including "regular" users in the interaction had hitherto been a lower priority but was supposed to be tackled, which was part of the motivation behind this thesis. As described in the previous section, user motivation is an important parameter for success. And interacting with other users and comparing yourself with others has a big impact on motivation as Anderson notes.

Establishing Apprl.com as a community platform is one of the future goals of the company and will properly further exploit the benefits of social commerce on a more personal level.

Besides the plain possibility of interaction, its value often lies in the subjective impact a user has. This closely ties in with findings presented in the previous section about motivation (3.1.2).

Paharia identifies purpose as one of the five key intrinsic motivators in his introductory chapter about motivation [26]. He defines purpose as the feeling of "I make a difference", an aspect that is most notably observed by the culture of "likes" and "re-posts" ("-tweets", "-pins", ...) on various social media platforms. People who are used to social media are accustomed to receiving likes and relevance is determined by what gets likes more than anything else. Nilforoush provided just one of many posts about the craze surrounding the "Like" in 2014 [36]; the number of other rants about the "like culture" is immense. Entire businesses are built around suggesting content that will generate likes, as demonstrated by Content Captain⁷, a German start-up. Giving every user the chance to participate in this culture and giving him the feeling of those small victories, doing something that matters is an important piece of the social interactions on modern websites. It is, however, important to give everyone a chance to be recognized for the content she shares and not to make the mistake of establishing only all time rankings in which an average user will never show up. Both Anderson and Chou make this point about not being too short-sighted about certain elements of gamification.

There was a huge spectrum of ideas surrounding this topic and thus, no full list is given about the possibilities that were considered during this stage. Furthermore, the insights won in the subsequent interviews (section 3.2) were deemed very important to pick the most promising ideas from the pool and refine them accordingly.

One area identified as deserving improvements was visibility: who can see your content? Vis- ibility of content could be modified in various ways and directions and only further input could steer in which. On one hand, exposing more users to your content, thus increasing your visibility, would satisfy a user’s drive for purpose. On the other hand, certain content might only be meant for certain people’s eyes when privacy is concerned. Facebook’s "close friends" list comes to mind in this regard.

Another key issue is figuring out who to "follow" in the first place. Online communities may have a certain level of intersection with real life acquaintances but as the likes of Twitter and Instagram showcase not everyone you follow needs to be someone you have met personally in order to be of particular interest to you. It seems important to give new users better ways of finding peers to follow to make their experience more social. Instead of artificial predictions, the idea here was to use actual activities, such as "this user liked the same products as you" to display similarities and encourage the forming of links within the network.

Among the more elaborate ideas extracted from these considerations were:

• Show "latest" and "friends" looks, to have a better chance of having your looks show up for other people. The existing "popular" feed is commonly dominated by users with bigger reach.

• More relevant notifications/alerts (who else liked the same things, summaries of how many likes your content received this week, etc.)

7http://contentcaptain.de/

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• Allow users to specify who gets to see their content based on groups or lists.

• Allow comments on products/looks (A version of this had existed before but didn’t fit into the product at the time)

3.1.4 Other Improvements

On a more general level many subtle tweaks to design and experience could be made. It is a common issue that you grow biased towards quirks of a system you helped build yourself. If it has been that way for a while, you stop questioning it. This effect may have also brushed off on the author, so that further considerations were postponed until more external feedback could be gathered. However, a few inconsistencies were identified and noted that had not previously been noticed by other members of Apprl. Some of those probably arose out of the simple fact that different parts of the application were added at different times and replicated similar features in slightly different ways instead of properly reusing existing code. Others were simply design decisions that seemed questionable and could not be traced back to any apparent reasoning.

Thinking beyond the current reach of Apprl, integrating Apprl with offline media such as magazines, flyers or billboards was another idea. Existing short-links for products or looks could be used for this purpose, but further solutions such as offering QR-codes directly on the site could be valuable additions.

For those using the platform mainly to drive sales through external channels, adding products to Apprl’s catalog themselves or making changes to wrongly parsed products seemed like useful features. Those particular ideas were conflicting with Apprl’s views but were still taken into considerations throughout the analysis and decision making phases.

3.2 Feedback from Users

Apprl is still a small start-up and does not have its own PR/marketing department. They sometimes get feedback from their bigger publishers and stores in their network but those groups can be considered business partners rather than regular users. Measuring success this far was mostly based on actual earnings being made. Feedback from regular users had not been gathered for a long time prior to this thesis project. While a lot of areas worth improving had been identified as described in the previous chapter, they were not the only topics of interest for gathering user feedback. As mentioned before, a certain bias towards your own product might make you insusceptible towards certain issues. Hence, all parts of the existing service were subject of investigation.

Interviews with existing or prospective users were conducted to gain these insights. It was important to learn how they react to and how they feel about Apprl’s services. The input from these interviews was of high importance for the decisions made later on and helped to clear out biased ideas that had been enthusiastically proposed by either the author or employees of Apprl and turned out to be of little or no meaning for the actual users.

3.2.1 Form of Feedback

For the specific goal identified prior to the interviews it was clear that the user experience, what motivates users in the short and long term had to be investigated first and foremost. Based on the fact that Apprl had already been operating for a considerable amount of time and had active users at the time of writing, the existing service could be used for the gathering of feedback. The existing interface was thus demonstrated as part of interactive interview sessions that led to more meaningful results than abstract questionnaires or other indirect forms of investigation. During the interview sessions, the peers were given a set of tasks to perform on the current platform.

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One part even involved one of the most prominent partner sites that was already using Apprl’s tool extensively: the fashion portal at www.metromode.se. They were asked to explain to the interviewer what they were doing and what they expected to be the outcome of certain actions they performed.

Interviewees were asked whether it would be okay to record audio of the interviews and they all agreed to that. Each interview’s audio recording was revisited at least once, but transcriptions were omitted due to time constraints. The interviews were not fully scripted but only prepared based on a general outline in order to make the peers feel more comfortable which was supported by the chosen environment: cafés in the center of Stockholm, selected by the interviewee. A full version of the outline for the interviews can be found in Appendix A. Watching the interaction closely, the interviewer was able to understand more subtle things such as the time it took a user to find the correct place to click and where they started looking first on the page. These insights coupled with the actively uttered feedback from users gave a much clearer picture of how the users felt rather than just measuring the time taken to perform a task under pressure. In fact, depending on the user’s speed, tasks were added, refined or removed to stay within the promised 30 minute time frame. When given the option to continue after 30 minutes however, all except one participant were willing to finish some more tasks and talk about other issues and the possible future of Apprl or social commerce in general.

The second, voluntary, part of the interviews was more theoretical and had been prepared under the assumption that the peers already had some time to understand Apprl’ service and that they were actively willing to contribute more. Feedback given bluntly without pressure from the interviewer is known to be less biased and thus more valuable. Predicting this behavior turned out to be correct. Once having completed the tasks most of the interviewed peers had some questions about certain functionalities or Apprl/social commerce in general which occasionally led to lively discussions about current and future developments. Thereafter, unless previously touched upon, a set of very direct questions were woven into the emerging discussions and lastly a few possible new features were presented to the interviewees, including some visual prototypes for the more complex feature ideas (see Appendix A and A.4). Those complex features were mainly geared to increase user’s motivation through usefulness or playfulness as outlined in 3.1.2 and were unlikely to be chosen for further pursuit due to the required time for developing them and the general preference for minimalism on Apprl’s side.

3.2.2 Selecting Peers

Over the course of 2.5 weeks, 10 peers were interviewed. Two of them were publishers on Apprl, the others either existing users or young consumers with different levels of interest in fashion.

Peers were chosen based on the target audiences currently or prospectively aimed at by Apprl.

In its existing form the service had been mostly used by fashion bloggers, or publishers, to create and reuse content. Thus, efforts in maintaining and improving the service had been mainly targeted towards that particular group of users. Other people with an extraordinary interest in fashion had been attracted by the service, too, but remained a minority. Expanding the user base would mean reaching out to new audiences, meaning people with less interest in fashion. As described in 2.1.2 the majority of people rely heavily on personal recommendations and since we also know that fashion matters to nearly everyone to a certain extent (2.1.1), bringing those who have less expertise in the field together with the influencers of the fashion scene is likely to yield desirable results for all parties involved. It was thus crucial to find peers with different attitudes towards fashion. A certain predisposition towards online services and social media was desirable but could generally be considered a given based on the fact that 72% of the Swedish society are using social networks and 85% are engaging in online shopping [28].

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Peers were invited through Facebook (prospective users) or personal eMails (existing users).

Facebook groups around student life and other activities were chosen to post the short invitations.

A friendly portrait of the author was used to give it a personal touch. Existing users were contacted based on their activity on the platform. Some of the selected ones used to be active but seemed to have stopped using the platform, their answers were expected to help understand what had been lacking in terms of long-term motivation even though they seemed to have enjoyed the service at some point.

As mentioned before, the focus of Apprl had been to improve their tools for publishers and few of them had been giving feedback actively unless something was not working at all. Furthermore, publishers are also making use of all the features for regular users; they simply have access to some additional options and statistics to monetize their content. In order to let publishers be a part of the study, some publishers were contacted based on business relations and the likeliness of them being available for an interview. A pledge from metromode.se (mentioned earlier) to have a few bloggers provide feedback for was never followed up on unfortunately.

3.3 Analysis of Results

Before moving on to the conceptualization of the features which were implemented during the course of this thesis, the results of the prior background research combined with findings of the subsequent interviews is discussed. This section mentions which opportunities turned out to be promising and also talks about the ones that could not be considered for further pursuit due to the companies’ plans or the feasibility of their implementation based on time and infrastructure constraints.

3.3.1 Results from Interviews

One thing was certain a few minutes into each of the interviews: using Apprl.com was "fun", as most users put it. Apprl’s service definitely had a certain appeal and peers said they were likely to use it again. That was an important milestone, but looking at the numbers of previous users, the initial excitement seems to have faded after a few weeks or months. The biggest points that would give the users a greater incentive to keep using the service for a prolonged time could be identified based on their comments during the interviews and especially during the following discussion. Not all statements and personal remarks could be considered individually. Therefore, recurring patterns and similar remarks by the interviewed peers were analyzed and captured in a spreadsheet trying to quantify the feedback as ground for discussion between the author and Apprl. Appendix A.5 shows the result of this process.

These are some exemplary quotes (paraphrased for better readability):

• "That content looks really polished. It’s great when I am looking at something nice and automatically get the option to buy it!"

• "I want to find everything I am looking for on Apprl. I am especially missing [brandname]"

• "Where do I find my stuff?"

• "I would really like to see [person of interest] on here."

• "I would want to work on a look together with friends, for example for coordinating our style for a big event"

• "Where does this come from? Why is it showing me dresses? I’m a guy!" [looking at the start page]

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Based on initial statements by the interviewed peers they could be considered quite diverse when it came to interest towards "fashion". The assumption for the project was that to a certain extent personal recommendations about fashion could be interesting to everyone. And indeed, all interviewees including those who had initially considered themselves "not interested in fashion"

helped underpin this assumption. During the course of the interviews each subject agreed, often to their own surprise, to sometimes base decisions about clothing purchases on input from people that are important to them: friends were named by nearly everyone and other influential figures in their lives, such as athletes, actors or even successful entrepreneurs played a role for more than half of those interviewed. This was valuable feedback and supported the general concept behind Apprl as well as the plan to become more social. Who is on the platform is more of a business goal and an important clue for the social media and marketing agenda but cannot be directly approached from a technological stand-point.

Some of the ideas that had been previously made up turned out to be rather unimportant for the users when confronted with them. A brief overview of those is given at the end of this section.

Other findings led to the selection of ideas to pursue further, which is described in the following section.

3.3.2 Selecting Ideas

Many of the identified areas for improvement clearly hit a nerve. Some new ideas only came up based on what was said during the interviews or were directly suggested by peers. The more promising topics are mentioned here and covered in more detail throughout the following chapter that works out concepts for actual implementation. To facilitate the process of choosing the most relevant ideas, the set of ideas that had been found to be worthy of further consideration after the interviews was mapped out on a table using small paper cards. A matrix layout was chosen to visualize the parts of Apprl’s service and the business interests covered by the various ideas. An annotated version of this step that clarifies the underlying structure is depicted in figure 2.

Figure 2: The gathered ideas structured by key interest areas for Apprl and part of the service.

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Visualizing the ideas in this way helped immensely in finding overlaps in the focus areas and partially confirmed some assumptions about what is important to users while other ideas were not even used any more at this point because they had proven to be of little interest. The selection of ideas to be implemented as part of the thesis was made based on three criteria:

1. Importance based on user feedback

2. Technical similarity to maximize efficiency during development 3. Value for the company

Without writing about the ideas of each individual card the general direction of results and the decisions towards which they led are explained here.

Social Interaction is Key Several of the interviewed peers expected that their interaction with the service would be more "fun" once they had some of their personal friends on the network and could interact with them. This finding correlates with an important insight from previous research: social interaction is very important for users; feeling as if their actions are perceived by others they care about is one of the key factors to keep them engaged in whatever community they have chosen to be a part of. The existing creation tools have proven to be fun for users but social features offer room for improvements. Comments were made that hinted to the importance of friends seeing your creations. From the set of initial ideas the idea of adding two new tabs to the list of existing looks that show "latest" and "friend’s" looks was promising to improve just that compared to the existing service. Another idea that appeared based on the interest of seeing more content related to people’s friends is to not only show looks they created but also ones the liked on their profile pages. There was a general tendency towards more fine-grained visibility scopes that can be understood to be about ensuring that friends see your content and you see theirs.

Some peers were interested in prohibiting access to certain content to the public altogether. This will surely be an issue for social commerce and seems an important concern to the author. The company’s stance on the topic, however, is to make everything public in general.

Furthermore, the re-introduction of a comment function has been identified as an important item to be put back onto Apprl’s roadmap and was scheduled to be carried out with more planning at a later point this year. An interesting question that could not be answered adequately with interviews was whether users would stay excited about their interaction with the content in the long term. However, it seemed that the interacting with relevant people is a key ingredient for long-term engagement with the service.

Notifications While the visual appeal of notifications was not tested during the interviews (a decision to redesign them had been made already), their importance for the users could be veri- fied. Some users, however, did not want to be "annoyed" by notifications. They only wanted to get an eMail about "important" things. What is important to an individual could not be unified into a single solution. Nevertheless, the desire for more relevant notifications, but possibly fewer notifications for those who preferred it, could clearly be seen. This led to further concept development regarding new types of eMail notifications and/or finer grained settings, such as "only send notification after at least 5 likes" as was suggested by one interviewed peer.

Additionally, bringing notifications onto the website itself proved to be a worthy addition for all users. For those users who simply did not want more eMails in their in-box this would still keep them updated about what is happening in Apprl, while others simply get an easier overview in addition to the eMail notifications.

In summary, three improvements in this area were selected for improvement during the next phase:

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• Visual templates for more appealing look of eMails

• New kinds of notification eMails such as activity summaries and/or finer grained settings.

• Including notifications on apprl.com for all users, whether they are receiving eMails or not.

Being Relevant Previously only considered within the context of being more socially relevant, some of the interviewed peers saw a certain value in finding things more quickly. The "similar products" panel on product pages was heavily used and found to be useful during the interviews. Its recommendations were based on a rather simple algorithm, and yet the need for a recommendation system running in the background did not seem warranted. One interviewee pointed out that she could just click a few more times when it is "just there anyways", so that the quality of the recommendations was not a limiting factor considering the convenience the feature added.

One identified issue, however, was the content users saw on their start page. Once they understood where it originated from (the users and brands you follow) they were less concerned but still felt like it could be more personalized, e.g. through also giving them a glimpse at what they liked recently. An actual problem was that the implementation had a bug that caused the gender setting on the start page to always default to "all". Coupled with the vast majority of female users and products this made the content seem much less relevant for male users. Accordingly, the new behavior was chosen to be using the user’s gender as default which could be considered a "bug fix"

rather than a new feature.

3.3.3 Dropped ideas

Of course not every idea could be followed up on within the given time. Other features simply didn’t comply with Apprl’s strategy, had been on the roadmap for later implementation already or simply were beyond the scope of what Apprl’s platform is supposed to offer. This section focuses on ideas that were dropped for those reasons.

The following chapter 4 also mentions concepts for some of the features that were identified as promising but put on hold for the time being.

Beyond Scope Unfortunately, some of the more complex features had never been expected to become reality during the thesis. While the feedback for them was positive in general, their implementation would have consumed more time than was available for development. In addition to that, Apprl’s philosophy has always been to strive for simplicity and less useful features have been removed before to streamline the experience. There exists, however, a plan to improve the APIs for third party developers. This might be accompanied by prototypical examples of what could be done based on the existing catalog of products, vendors and tools that Apprl already offers or eventually result in other developers realizing similar ideas. The "Look Slot Machine"

and "Notepad" concepts are promising candidates for external services built on top of those APIs.

One feature that was used by two of the peers only but turned out to be of limited usefulness was the search feature. Depending on the search term the results ranged from very close matches to completely unrelated content. It was unclear to the author what the exact algorithm did but it seemed to mostly rely on description text and product names. There was no direct mapping of keywords to categories so that for example using terms including colors might also yield results that went along with or had details in that color. A short discussion with (only the business part of) Apprl revealed that the area had been identified as low-priority before and was expected to require a bigger development effort to be re-built. A technical analysis was thus not carried out.

An interesting point that had been noticed before and was confirmed by one interviewed pub- lisher was that fashion bloggers tend to have very high standards for their content. That particular

From Discovery to Purchase: Improving the User Experience for Buyers in eCommerce

From Discovery to Purchase:

Improving the User Experience for Buyers in eCommerce

JASPER HAHN

From Discovery to Purchase

JASPER HAHN

Stockholm 2015

Software Engineering of Distributed Systems School of Information and Communication Technology

Kungliga Tekniska Högskolan

Abstract

Sammanfattning

Contents

List of Figures

List of Tables

1 Introduction

1.1 Goal

1.2 Scope

1.3 Thesis Structure

2 Background

2.1 eCommerce and Fashion today

2.2 Apprl

2.3 Additional Reading: Fashion, Commerce and Online User Experiences

2.4 Related Products and Services

3 Identifying Opportunities

3.1 Brainstorming and Inspiration

3.2 Feedback from Users

3.3 Analysis of Results