As UX Designers know, the experience does not end once the user puts an item in their digital cart. The entire customer journey affects their valuation of the product and if an on-line checkout process makes it hard, users may abandon their purchase. I made the switch from commercial Interior Design to UX Design because I was interested in consumer interactions and choices and how visual design and user experiences translated into business gains for a company. Retail atmospherics, a physical expression of business value, are all about making the sale, but dressing rooms are often forgotten. I wanted to see how much they might be affecting purchase decisions. What was happening in the dressing room and how were atmospherics affecting the customer journey? I was a pioneer at quantifying the effects of dressing room lighting on purchase decisions. It was mostly ignored back then, but my article launched a lot more research into dressing room effect and I am glad that it did. It is something that shoppers care about a lot even when many retailers don't.
Lighting can be measured in terms of lux, lumens, candela, and watts. I was the first to translate dressing room lighting dimensions and metrics into something that users could relate to -- feelings. It's a lot like UX research in that way; both talk about conversions and users and empathy but when it comes down to it, it is all about justifying the extra expense to business stakeholders whether they are product owners or retailers. Dressing rooms were often an afterthought that retailers felt no need to change, until the research was there to prove that it could affect their bottom line. It was a user pain point, and like in UX testing, interior design research is key to validating design solutions.
Overall environment affects a complex web of evaluations of self and experience. The same things happen when we evaluate consumer interactions with an app or product. Users continuously internalize their interactions and judge whether the experience matches their self-identity. All of this affects emotion. Users cannot always tell us what is wrong, though they often can, but we can measure their emotional affect to ensure we capture things they cannot express.
From Baumstarck (2008)
http://etd.fcla.edu/UF/UFE0024065/baumstarck_a.pdf
One thing that my dressing room research taught me, other than research methods and analysis, was that how you ask a question is important. Research is a delicate tool because, as the "observer effect" in physics teaches us, measuring or observing something changes the results. We open the fridge and the temp goes up, if we watch customers they become more self-aware, and if we ask a question we are changing how people view the problem or even creating a problem that was not there in the first place.
If you want to read the full article or even the full thesis you can get a more detailed breakdown but for now I want to provide an overview and go into the rationale behind the study and our choices. For the sake of simplicity and to minimize the number of participants required, my thesis advisor, Nam-Kyu Park, and I settled on a sample of young women and found a local store with good foot-traffic that offered a crisp and unadorned dressing room experience. We were trying to limit the effects of preference for one or another design style. Had time and money not been a consideration, we could have tested in multiple store. We had lighting donated from Lithonia Lighting so we could install mirror side lighting that offered an approximate level of illumination on the user as the overhead lighting provided as measured with light meters.
I then went about crafting and pre-testing a long survey using semantic differentials, likert-scales, and open-ended questions. I had a pre-survey and an in dressing room survey. With my advisor, I went through a lot of survey changes. We wanted to measure the emotional and cognitive responses as well as the purchase intentions without prejudicing their results with biased questions. There was no body of dressing room research to iterate on back then. People have since used mine as a launching point but at the time of my thesis I had to base the questions on other environmental and marketing research.
I was in the store administering the testing but I had to rely on participants to answer questions on their own in the dressing room. We could not invade their privacy and we did not want to affect their reflections or experience. We also wanted them to answer as they were standing in front of the lighting. All sixty women were asked to try one of the two lighting scenarios. We only got one shot and we didn't get the opportunity to ask them why or question their behavior. Also, very importantly, I paid them. We offered gift certificates for the store and whereas I did advertise to bring people in I also had to intercept a lot of customers.
After data collection finished, I input results into Excel and SASS and let the computers do a bit of multivariate magic. Then I took a long look at all the data. Some things just didn't predict the purchase intention, but my advisor helped a lot to find out what combination of variables were predictors of purchase intent. We went through the data together.
We had decided to focus on intent to purchase rather than actual purchase since a lot of times people would come back and think about it. There was no way to track if they came back other than to follow gift certificate redemptions but there was also no guarantee that those redemptions were for the same products that they tried on in the first place or that when they came back they used the same lighting condition. Qualitative data reinforced some of the quantitative data and also provided some of its own unique insights.
When I did a content analysis and examined comment type, those in the frontal lighting condition had more positive comments compared to their overhead lighting counterparts. Based on the results, I created general PERSONAS based on user-types we could identify from the research. I used narrative to describe how they would interact with the dressing room experience. The biggest finding was that purchase intention was correlated to intent to purchase and lighting had an effect on shadowing. If you don't think that makes a difference, then just remember the old childhood campfire trick of holding a light under your face to look scary. It's the same but in reverse. They now sell selfie lights to combat this in photos because it makes a difference. We look better rested and generally appraise others better when they are viewed under sky light -- a universal omni-directional and generally much more flattering light that comes from the sun being diffused from the sky.
"The consumer walks in and the light is soft. “Softer lighting [is] better and more flattering” she thinks. The lighting on the side of the mirror looks “calming and seems like a bar or restaurant in the evening.” It is trendy and it fills the room with even light. I look pretty good for having been out most of the night, she thinks. She leans into the mirror and starts to trace her fingers over her face.Maybe a little tired. She sets her bag down on the chair and hangs her clothes on the hook. She takes off her shirt and pants and does not mind seeing herself in the mirror. “I love the lighting. It [makes] me look like my skin ha[s] a healthy glow.Also, my eyes look amazing. The light is very flattering.” She puts on what she picked out and twirls in front of the mirror briefly before fixing herself in one place and evaluating her appearance more closely. She is glad she has been going to the gym because she looks skinny. Or is it the lighting? “I feel like it is flattering,” she thinks “slimming, and exciting.” Still looking in the mirror she evaluates the hem of the dress. It hits her at just the right place on the leg. Not too long and not too short. It makes her legs look slender. The color is good too she thinks. She decides to buy it. She tries on another dress. It is a little longer and black. She immediately hates the way it looks. It is too long and against the black curtain it is “hard to see how well the dress fits me.” The other dress was more vibrant and now that she thinks about it, made her more tan. She buys the first dress."
From Baumstarck (2008)
http://etd.fcla.edu/UF/UFE0024065/baumstarck_a.pdf
The dressing room experience was much more dynamic than just the customer's interaction with clothes. The same is true in UX. When we asked participants what was important to them, they had a very clear list of things like chairs, hooks, carpeting, and of course lighting. Retailers have always wanted to know how their shoppers were interacting on the sales floor and on how they could use the store to get people to try the clothes, shoes, or sporting equipment. Yet, if you stop there you are missing a very key part of the experience. No one part of the experience is less important than another.
The same is true in digital product design and in digital retail. Marketing and graphics and great reviews can get users to download that app or try a product, but when they are interacting with that product, all the marketing and buzz won't save a poor user experience. That affects referrals and continued engagement. That affects sales. Users don't need you to give them every feature in the world. They need quality ones. Well researched and implemented UX is what keeps that customer coming back.
