Aims and Objectives

I worked with Bravissimo to help redesign their online e-commerce experience as part of a small delivery team at Brighton digital agency Clearleft. The retailer has high street stores at a number of locations throughout the country and one of their main selling points is their in store customer experience. Unfortunately this experience wasn’t being reflected on their website which, although has healthy traffic and sales, was dull, functional and tired. As a result the site didn’t reflect the retailers brand values so they required a bold redesign that they could be proud of which would make them stand out from their competitors.

The retailer had also noticed an increase in mobile traffic and wanted to improve the experience for their customers by having a fully responsive website and they wanted to learn from us so that they could take on further design and development work in house.

The final challenge was to develop a pattern library which was able to cover the needs of retailers two brands which are both served by the same site but which sell different products.

My role within this project was to lead the UX. This involved stakeholder management, research and UX design work, presenting it back to the client and working with the team at Clearleft.

Method

Discovery Phase

As with most large projects I undertake the first stage was to immerse myself in the subject and find out as much about the buying experience as I could.

Field Research

I really wanted to know more about the in store shopping experience from not only the clients shops but also that of their competitors. What makes a good experience for a woman buying lingerie?

I learn’t quite early on from informal chats to female friends that what separates the stores is not just the range of products and sizes but also the advice you get as a customer.  To understand this more I set out with my partner to get bra fittings in all of the major department stores and specialist shops in the local area.

I noticed early on that there was a marked difference between the approaches from traditional department stores and specialist retailers like my client. The traditional approach on fittings from department stores was very much about the authority figure dictating the size and style and the approach from the specialist retailer is much more friendly and about finding what product feels right for the customer.

Competitor Analysis

Following on from the field research I was interested to find out more about how lingerie retailers sell their products online and how that compared to the in store experience.

The more traditional department stores had very traditional websites which mirrored the way they talked to customers in their shops. I was therefore surprised to find that none of the newer, specialist retailers hadn’t really capitalised on what they were offering in their shops and had chosen to develop very traditional, functional websites with none of the friendly customer service traits from the shops being reflected online.

Stakeholder Interviews

Once the initial market place research had been completed the next step was to talk to the various stakeholders to find out more about their needs and expectations for the new site.

Quite often in initial kickoff meetings with other clients I hear a lot about a desire for bold approaches to design and this was something I was keen to explore further with the group. We had a series of one to one and group workshop exercises where we went into depth about this and it was interesting to hear some agreement about certain aspects of the website but also the conflicting ideas within the company about how to take it forward.

Usability Testing

The final part of the discovery phase of the project was to talk to existing customers and also women who maybe customers in the future. The testing was part interview and also part to uncover what issues lie within the existing website.

Within the interviews I was interested in find out what the triggers and touch points were when women buy new underwear. Following on from this I wanted to see how their buying habits translated to the website through testing the main buying user journey customers go through.

Throughout the project I conducted more rounds of testing as the designs developed.

Card Sort

I conducted a card sorting exercise for both brands websites early on in the project. The reasons for doing this were to understand how customers naturally grouped the product range and also to gain insight into customers understanding of the labelling used to describe the clients products. The findings of this testing helped inform the new IA that was to be used on the site.