SSENSE
Project Overview
Identify problem areas within the website journey experience across desktop screen sizes and provide proposed user experience and user interface solutions.
MY ROLE
UI Design
User Research
Prototyping
TOOLS
Figma
Miro
Procreate
Google Forms
TIMELINE
3 Weeks
Process
Problem
Business Need: Provide a range of luxury items to gen-z and millennials
User Need: Platform to purchase a variety of luxury items
Product: Website & app which enables users to purchase luxury items
Solution
I will be creating a product that supports SSENSE’s business goals by improving the information architecture, lowering the bounce rate and increasing conversions. Additionally, users will be able to easily navigate through the site and complete purchases seamlessly.
My Design Process
Research
Competitor Analysis
I carried out a competitor analysis on three of SSENSE’s direct competitors; Net-a-porter, Farfetch & Selfridges. These competitors provide the same product selection as SSENSE and have similar target audiences. I analysed each website to identify strengths and weaknesses of the customer journey on the Homepage, View items page and Product pages. This helped me to identify opportunities to improve the customer journey, user interface and sales. I completed a SWOT analysis for SSENSE to display their strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and threats.
User Interviews
To further understand SSENSE users and their pain points, I carried out user interviews to grasp how users are currently navigating through the site. The interview consisted of 5 participants that regularly shop from luxury retailers. Below are the key takeaways from the user interviews.
User Persona
Emily Samual
26 years old
Female
Social Media Manager £50,000 per year
London
Emily has just relocated to London from a small town in the north of England. She made this move after receiving a new job offer as a social media manager for a luxury fashion house. Emily has always had a huge passion and interest in fashion and feels that she now has the budget to experiment with new fashion styles. She spends a lot of her time reading fashion magazines and looking for new trends on social media.
FRUSTRATIONS
Seeing new designer items on social media but struggling to find them online.
Struggling to find styling tips to experiment with.
Hard to keep up to date with trends, fashion news and fashion information.
GOALS
Discover a place to read fashion news and blog posts explaining trends and styles.
Easily find new releases and on-trend items in various colour ways all in one place
Affinity Map Takeaways
User Pain Points
User Flow
Design
Card Sorting
To gain a better understanding of how users navigate through e-commerce websites, I conducted a card sorting exercise with a participant to see where they would categories specific items.
Design System
Information Architecture
Low Fidelity
High Fidelity Mockups
Accessibility
During the design process, I ensured that accessibility guidelines were all met. The original colours of the website already met WCAG standards which is why I kept them the same. However, the actual font sizes were at 11px which, the participants in my user interviews voiced was too small. Because of this, I increased the font size, resulting in the text on the pages being much easier to read.
To ensure the designs are user centred I implemented UX laws:
Jakob's Law:
Implementing Jakob's law allowed me to implement improvements that create familiarity for users whilst navigating the websites as the user flow is similar to competitor sites. Analysing competitors' sites helped me to understand what features users value. According to the user interview results, users value a drop-down menu and filters to sort through products, hence why these features were implemented in the design.
Hicks Law:
Implementing Hick's Law allowed me to reduce decision making time by minimising choices across the page. On the homepage shortcuts to each product category and blog posts were added to create progressive onboarding to minimize cognitive load for new users.
Result
Conclusion
I thoroughly enjoyed the process for this case study and I am happy with the results. I managed to do thorough user research and understand the target users' pain points and needs which allowed me to make suitable design decisions. I learnt how to design for user needs whilst simultaneously prioritising business needs too.
Lessons that I learnt are to make sure every design decision is backed by research/user research and to get feedback from other designs as a fresh pair of eyes may pick up on something or have different perspectives.
If I had more time I would've conducted usability testing and A/B testing to prove my hypothesis and design decisions. Due to the time constraints of the project I was unable to do so, however, I believe having this data, would've backed my design decisions or would've helped with improvements.
Prototype