User Interviews

I went to local coffee shops to interview people within these personas about their shopping experiences. My objective was to learn more about their goals, needs, motivations, and frustrations.

Number of participants: 5

Gender: All female

Age: 20-45

Location of interviews: South Delhi

I found that participants associated shopping online with convenience and that finding exactly what they were looking for (be it size, style, or price) was often a challenge. When I asked about fantastic shopping experiences, participants mentioned having positive impressions of personalization options (narrowing down product listings to show only their desired size, style, or price range) and of customer service representatives who helped them find what they were looking for. The results here match with what I found in market research and I was able to gain a deeper understanding of why users want to have personalized shopping experiences.

Competitive Analysis

To better understand how Lulu and Sky can uniquely position itself in the market, I analyzed the strengths and weaknesses of two direct competitors: H&M and Zara. I identified these brands as direct competitors because they are all fast fashion companies that offer similar products and target similar audiences as Lulu and Sky.

User Persona

Using those research insights and user needs, developed a persona as a representation of the website’s target audience – Janne Beck, a young professional. The goals, needs, frustrations and motivations were all derived from research insights.

This persona serves as a guideline for the rest of the design process – be it mapping out new features, creating a brand identity, or deciding on icon style for the website's user interface.

Empathy Map

Empathy maps are a great tool for understanding your users, organizing our research, and driving a human rather than technical view of a product or project. We create them to provide a proxy for the user during design and to ensure that the project team is in a human-centered mindset. It allows us to understand the broader influencers in user's lives. And by organizing our research into a coherent vision, this tool allows us to gain empathy with our users and to create a cohesive, empathetic view of them. Knowing how the user feels, how would they feel about this design decision?

Open Card Sorting

Using an online open card sort activity, I identified categories to use for grouping clothing items in the website's navigation menu: tops, bottoms, sweaters, outerwear (jackets, coats), shoes, and accessories. See the card sort results bellow.

Sitemap

With the results of the card sort and inspiration from other competitor websites, I created a site map to define the overall structure of the website. This was to ensure that products were going to be placed where users would expect to find them when visiting the website and make the experience more intuitive.

‍It’s important to clearly define the website’s navigational structure before creating any wireframes or designs. Otherwise, the project risks becoming inherently disorganized, running into scope creep, or having illogical navigation – all of which would result in an unpleasant user experience.

Feature Roadmap

To determine which features to prioritize in the website design, I mapped out various features according to how mission-critical they are.

Lulu and Sky’s mission is to sell clothing, so the Minimum Viable Product (MVP) for an ecommerce website must be able to showcase and sell products. Thus, the checkout flow and product catalog (and navigation menu, so users can find these pages) were set as first priority. I also included the FAQ/Help pages as Priority 1 because Lulu and Sky’s reputation is based on its phenomenal customer service.

User Flow

This user flow walks through the process of landing on Mirror’s website from a Google search, finding a particular item, and purchasing that item. The choices available at the end of the checkout process allow the user to continue to interact with the website, so that with the brand doesn’t stop at purchase.

Task Flow

I took one of the branches from the user flow and outlined a task flow as a way to map out the individual pages that I need to design.

PRODUCT REQUIREMENTS

Then I created the Product Requirements to highlight the features that I believed to be most important so that I would know what features to include in the first roll out of the product.