Intro
Innisfree is a South Korean beauty and skincare brand with a global online and offline presence and a well-established base of loyal customers. Until recently, they had several brick-and-mortar retail stores located across Australia, giving customers a place to try, smell and feel their products, and a captivating space for employees to help guide customers to products that suit them best.
The Problem
With the imminent closure of their retail stores and the increasing competition from prominent online beauty retailers, Innisfree’s website urgently needs to bridge the gap between in-store experiences and online shopping. The current presentation of products and user experience are not meeting the expectations of their customers, leading to a growing number of disgruntled online shoppers.
The Solution: A Deep-dive UX Audit
We undertook a meticulous UX audit, identifying the most underperforming points in the user journey and collaborating with Innisfree to devise and execute the recommendations.
Involving comprehensive data analysis, user observations, competitor & industry research, and a heuristic evaluation, the audit was split up by website section which detailed and benchmarked it’s current performance and presented recommendations and action items that could be implemented quickly and easily to see an immediate improvement in the performance of the website as a whole.
Data and User Analysis
Utilising Google Analytics and Insightech, we conducted an in-depth data analysis to pinpoint the weakest aspects of the user experience, including user entry points, continuation rates, device performance, and industry benchmarking.


Our inital data analysis revealed that users on mobile devices were in the majority at 70%, they were having the worst user experience out of desktop and mobile devices and the website funnels we generated highlighted the exceptionally high drop-off rate from the cart page, with an 85%+ abandonment rate. We also discovered users were entering the website mainly at product pages, from paid search and organic search channels.

We compared the cart addition rate and direct conversion rate of product and collections pages against each other, since collections page tiles enable users to add to their cart directly, and discovered that product pages were performing lower than collections pages.

This initial data analysis uncovered our priorities: The cart and the product pages on mobile devices were performing sub-optimally and the user experience at these points were bringing down the website’s performance as a whole.
Digging even deeper…
Now that we had identified out problem areas, we employed the use of more analytics tools, namely that of Insightech, to product scroll and interaction maps of the cart and product pages to see what users were interacting and engaging with (and what they weren’t), as well as brining in some competitor analysis from some much more established online brands.



This excersise conducted across all page templates in the website, reveal valuable insights on user behaviour not previously considered by the client. For example, our behaviour analysis uncovered that users weren’t being exposed to the many fantastic ratings and reviews the products receive, that users desired to read the description, but would get frustrated when they couldn’t close the modal, and that content that would work well to convert users (free gifts with purchase information) was effectively hidden by singular and somewhat vague icon that would often be hidden by the user’s thumb whilst scrolling.
After conducting a thorough research and data analysis of the current website, we developed a set of recommendations that, when implemented, have the potential to significantly improve Innisfree’s online bottom-line. This heuristic audit combined our research with industry best-practices and design principles, ensuring the recommendations were impactful.
The Audit
The audit was separated by website section, focusing on the cart and product pages first. Problems and issues identified were assigned a rating to aid in advising the client which items should take priority when implementing changes on the website.




Paired with screenshots of the current website and markups denoting where the issue has been observed, the Innisfree audit delivered an insight and a paired action for each identified problem, and prioritised them based on development effort and impact in a backlog ready for implementation from the client.
Recommendations Presented
The recommendations presented to the client highlighted a myriad of issues across all areas of the site, with items rated as ‘Critical’ mainly pertaining to missing information or missing functionality, for example:
- Shipping totals and total savings being omitted from the cart’s order summary, leaving users in the dark about the final cost of their order before clicking checkout,
- The coupon code field being absent from the cart potentially deterring users who have a coupon to use from checking out, as it isn’t clear that the website does accept them,
- ‘Floating’ buttons and icons obscuring valuable functionality and information, or being placed within the user’s thumb-target, leading to accidental taps on undesired functions
Conclusion
A culmination of a considerable amount of research spanning across data analysis, user observation, industry research and design principles, the UX audit delivered to Innisfree identified the areas of the site which were bringing down the whole user experience, resulting in sub-optimal performance, and a low conversion rate.
The implementation of my team’s UX audit recommendations for the Australian Innisfree website resulted in a 5% increase in average order value, a 59% increase in orders, and a 66% increase in conversion rate.
Stay posted for final designs!