MUJI
A UX Research and Information Architecture project.
Who is MUJI?
MUJI, originally founded in Japan in 1980, offers a wide variety of good quality products including household goods, apparel and food. Mujirushi Ryohin, MUJI in Japanese, translates as “no-brand quality goods.”
MUJI is based on three core principles:
1. Selection of materials
2. Streamlining of processes
3. Simplification of packaging
Project Overview:
In this project I will be analyzing information architecture process on MUJI's existing US website, to organize and making the website more intuitive and user friendly.
My Role:
UX Researcher, UX Designer
Timeframe:
2 weeks
Tools:
Miro, Excel, Optimal Workshop
Methodologies:
Heuristic Evaluation
Competitors & Comparative Features Analysis
Card Sorting (Open/Closed)
Tree Testing
Sitemaps
User Flows
Heuristic Evaluation
I started with doing a Heuristic Evaluation on MUJI’s desktop website using Abby’s method to walkthrough the site to see if I can identify any issues that can be improved for their users.
First, I followed the process doing screen by screen analysis to see if the pages layout is consistent throughout the website. Then I created three simple tasks of locating a product to purchase for each page that I am evaluating. Overall I found issues such as:
Search bar not able to find related product by keywords.
Filter options provided are not based on users’ common needs.
Color contrasts not meeting standards in multiple areas.
Product terminology used aren’t common in US.
Not enough product description provide to users to understand the their products.
Competitive & Comparative Feature Analysis
After doing Heuristic Evaluation, a question came into my mind: “If I am brand new to MUJI, what are the reasons to buy from MUJI when there are millions of similar products out there? Is MUJI providing similar features as the competitors?” With this thought in mind I created competitive and comparative analysis to compare some common features:
MUJI does have most of the standard features its competitors/ comparators are offering, but they do not have the best practice or involve any innovation to provide users an intuitive user experience with these features. They have features but functionality is not ideal.
Original Sitemap
Before evaluating further into MUJI’s website, first I created a sitemap based on the existing website. This way I can clearly understand the basic structures of the website and how each secondary category is assigned to its primary category.
Card Sorting (Open/Closed)
Now I have a better understanding of user experience on MUJI's website as well as its competitors and comparators' websites, I need to dig deeper by doing Card Sorting (2 rounds) to discover how users categorize the information given from MUJI website and whether MUJI's current structure works for their users
Open Card Sorting (10 participants): To understand what kind of organizing makes the most sense for users. Most users created the sorting label by room: if the item on the cards belongs to the rooms that's mostly used. One of the bigger issues were the label's terminology, such as "trivet" and "utensils" are confusing.
Closed Card Sorting (10 participants): To understand if MUJI's Primary categories make sense to users. Users were able to organize many of the cards with corresponding labels but struggled with slippers and storage and organizers.
With the result I got from card sorting, I found that MUJI has 2 main issues that could improve for their users:
Re-organize categories based on what makes sense to the users not by company's internal categories.
Review labels and consider changing to a more common terminology.
Tree Testing
By knowing the challenges that users are having with MUJI's website, I sketched out a proposed ideal to improve the category structure and labels that caused confusion to users. Then I created 3 tasks in tree testing to test out the change I made based on card sorting results:
Move storage & organizers up to the primary category as it is one of the most selling items in MUJI → testing to see if now is easier for users to locate; originally it was hidden under furniture & interior.
Rewording "Jars & Container" to "Food Storage" but keeping it under kitchen category because in card sorting users were easily confused as it is part of storage & organizing items in bathroom or bedroom.
Rewording "Utensils" to "Flatware" as utensils could be writing utensils or other utensils, using a term that represents eating utensils might be more ideal.
Result of tree testing: all users found it easier to locate storage & organizers and both "food storage" and "flatware" had a 60% success rate. With the testing result now I can create a proposed sitemap for the solution.
Proposed Sitemap
With the proposed sitemap I was able to reduce MUJI website’s primary categories from 12 to 10 and make sure every primary category has more intuitive secondary categories for users.
Main changes reflected the proposed sitemap:
Combine home fabric, bathroom, and housekeeping categories into household category → clearer direction path for users, less confusion between whether a product belongs to bathroom or housekeeping.
Separate Furniture and Storage items into two different categories → storage items are one of the popular items for MUJI, this way is easier for the user to get to the popular item group.
Re-organize secondary categories for the kitchen and updated some labels with more common wording for users.
Merge New Arrival, Special Offers, and Clearance to Feature → re-grouping primary categories that do not have secondary categories and combined them under feature as they all served as a promotional tool on the website.
Re-structure “Health & Beauty” into 2 primary categories “Travel” and “Personal Care”→ In the original site Travel is grouped under Health &Beauty, which is irrelevant, so I reviewed competitors who have similar product categories and re-group and re-organize into 2 separate primary categories “Travel” and “Personal Care“ which make more sense for all genders since many customers always found it very famine with the category name “Health & Beauty”.
User Flows
By implementing the result of all three methods of Information Architecture research I have done and in order the see if the improvements of the navigation have been made, I created flow charts to compare the user flow based on the existing sitemap vs. my proposed sitemap. The proposed user flow was able to continue offering users 2 different ways to approach buying the product, but now it has slightly less process to complete the test.
User Flow based from MUJI’s Original Sitemap
User Flow based from My proposed MUJI Sitemap
Takeaways
The importance of information architecture is to organize website contents that users (target audience) could easily use in order to maximize the functionality. I found it very interesting when doing both card sorting and tree testing, you will be surprised how people think alike and different, as a UX designer I should understand the target audience thoroughly and build a website experience that they could easily use at the same time helping business (client) to improve their interactions with their users.