The University of Oregon Duck store acts as the on-campus bookstore, selling everything from textbooks, to hoodies, to art supplies at its 13 locations and online. The Duck Store relied on separate systems for textbook sales and general merchandise sales with a third solution to support ecommerce. To maintain accurate inventory with these siloed systems, an employee had to manually upload online orders into the ERP and in-store sales into the ecommerce platform every day.
Aside from consolidating their backend ERP and POS systems, the Duck Store needed a full redesign of their ecommerce store to better represent the University of Oregon’s school spirit. The customer experience needed to be consistent for all products, and the interface of their textbook sales engine needed to be rehauled so students and faculty could better search and purchase books.
I met with representatives from the school's marketing team and student associations to understand the aspects of the university's spirit they wanted to capture. I had the participants put together inspiration boards to communicate their ideas, and we collaborated on elements like typography, image guidelines, brand voice, etc., that best represented their ideas. It was a fun, iterative process that resulted in a fully responsive store design that captured the Ducks' spirit.
Once the ERP backend was consolidated, I proceeded to design a unified shopping and checkout experience that was consistent for all products, and users were no longer forced to maintain separate carts for textbooks and general products. With a better experience, average online order value increased by 30 percent and cart-abandonment was reduced by 25 percent. I also gave users the option to opt for in-store pickup on their orders to broaden the customer-base.
With thousands of textbooks available for purchase, an intuitive and efficient process for finding books to purchase was key. I overhauled how textbooks were categorized, designing an information hierarchy that didn't force users to scroll through countless search results. Students were now able to progressively filter their search by semester, department, course, and course reference number to find the books relevant to their needs.
