Role

UX Writer Intern

Collaborators

Mark Dumschat (Sr. Content Designer)

Tools

Google Suite

Figma

Timeline

3 weeks

Overview

The Bay (Owned by Hudson’s Bay Company) was a Canadian e-commerce platform that hosted vendors online. We started this project in Fall 2022 and I was the UX Writer Intern responsible for researching and presenting the data. For this project, we wanted to enhance the customer’s online shopping experience through CTAs and ultimately created guidelines on CTA best practices for TheBay.com

Main problems

Some main problems we uncovered in our exploration phase included:

  1. Buttons with different functionality used the same copy — the same words lead to different actions
  2. Inconsistent treatment of Call-to-Action (CTA) buttons across the site. This included elements like language, colour, and navigation/destination
  3. We didn’t have any guidelines on handling CTA microcopy on TheBay.com, and our teams were fragmented with no north star
  4. Specifically, there was confusion around the way we worded, “Shop items”, “Shop now”, or “Shop all” which was uncovered during feedback by our VP

Process

Stakeholders asked the content design team (us) to find out whether we use “Shop items”, “Shop now”, or “Shop all” for our CTAs in the checkout and cart page.

We started with exploring microcopy for the free shipping threshold CTA in cart. Initially, we started with one small part of the customer check-out flow and worked our way out across the site, searching for CTAs that resembled “Shop <something>”. But quickly, we realized we unearthed a larger problem which permeated through the whole site. We found that CTAs were being treated inconsistently through copy, style, and navigation.

We decided to do a content inventory on TheBay.com’s CTAs including information such as:

This was recorded in a spreadsheet. The CTAs were taken from a variety of locations in the site (e.g. banners, advertisement cards, popup modals, forms, PDPs).