This article is part of our Mobile Teardown Tuesday blog series. Each Tuesday, we choose a mobile app and suggest a few experiments the team might consider running to optimize the user experience. Click here to learn more about Optimizely for iOS.

Teardown Tuesday: Oasis

It’s only August but Christmas planning in the e-commerce world is in full throttle.  If you’re in e-commerce, then you have 3 months left to nail down the user experience, fill up those email lists and make the checkout funnel as frictionless as possible before Christmas code lockdown arrives and the keys are thrown out until 2015. You’ve probably experienced this on the web for years, but what about your iPhone apps?

Oasis is one veteran UK brand who will definitely be looking for a prosperous Christmas season, especially on mobile.  With physical stores, a website and mobile apps, Oasis is set to engage with their target 18-30 year old female audience across all channels over the next few months.

With mobile purchases on the rise, let’s look at how Oasis can prepare their app today to ensure their conversions are as high as possible when peak time comes and a significant chunk of the annual revenue is at stake.

Experiment with the Home Screen Banner

An app user is unlike a website visitor in one very important way: App users don’t just stumble onto your website by clicking a link or an ad. They are deliberate. They go through quite a high engagement process of installing your app and then launching it. This means the app user is more likely to have some deeper connection to your brand. It could also mean app users are less likely to be searching for random deals and more likely to be genuinely searching for what their favourite fashion brand has to offer.

With that in mind, it’s surprising to see that Oasis displays the same banner across its website’s homepage and its iOS app’s home screen:

If the app user already likes Oasis’ fashion and has their app installed, maybe she will prefer to know that a new collection is out rather than see alerts about a big sale right away. Oasis could easily test app users’ engagement with alternative banners, for example a New Collection banner rather than a discount banner.

The best performing banner could garner more taps and, by not setting discount expectations right from the start, could lead to a higher average conversion value per user and higher overall revenue.

Experiment with Product Views

Oasis’s  product screens have great images for each product but no product details . It can be surprising and frustrating not to find any size menus at first. This could easily cause users to lose patience and switch to another app. Surprisingly, when you click “Add To Bag” the size menu pops up.

By testing the text on the call to action button, Oasis could help users both find what they’re looking for and also increase the clarity through the checkout flow.

Checkout Funnel

We began with an assumption that app users were more engaged than the average website visitor. Those folks who reach your checkout funnel are the crème de la crème of the engaged users. Oasis should use testing to make sure their experience from this point on is as frictionless as possible because this is where the £’s are counted.

There are a lot of opportunities for testing and optimisation here. As examples,  Oasis can try making the form fields larger, breaking up the form into multiple shorter steps, removing  the opt-in text at the top of the page or adding a clear CTA to the bottom of the form. Let’s focus on this last example.

On the first page of the funnel, Oasis has two “Checkout” CTAs. One at the top right that doesn’t stand out much and one big pink CTA you can’t miss a the bottom. However, subsequent views, only include one small CTA in the top right corner.

This sign-up form is a point of high risk friction in the checkout flow. It’s where the user needs to considerably increase focus, probably use both hands to type and watch out for errors. Because of this higher involvement, Oasis must make it extremely clear that a user has reached the end of the form and what the next step is. Why not add a clear CTA at the end like on the initial checkout page?

Running this proposed test and the others mentioned above could have huge impact on overall sales through the Oasis app. It could result in a higher form completion rate, additional registered users and more successful purchases.

Oasis is an established brand in the competitive UK fashion market and maintaining that position is going to take constant checks and balances across each customer engagement channel. Leading up to Christmas, especially with the ever-increasing popularity of mobile commerce, A/B testing every step of the app experience is one way a retailer like Oasis can make the absolute most of this peak season.

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