What Goes Around Comes Around

REDESIGNING THE E-COMMERCE EXPERIENCE

COMPANY: WHAT GOES AROUND COMES AROUND

PROJECT TYPE: E-COMMERCE WEBSITE REDESIGN & MAINTENANCE

DATES: JULY 2018 - NOV 2018 (w/ enhancements/maintenance ongoing)

ROLE: LEAD PRODUCT DESIGNER

I was the Lead Product Designer for the entirety of the project cycle, starting with strategy, planning, and requirements gathering through to the design phase, prototyping, user research, and handoff to development. I also collaborated closely with our executive team, as well as the marketing, e-commerce, merchandising, shipping, and retail teams.

SUMMARY

What Goes Around Comes Around (WGACA) is the world’s leading purveyor of vintage luxury goods, ranging from Birkins to Levi’s. But their web presence was lagging behind the competition and lacking the proper form to best represent and highlight products on the web. This project was a full redesign of the e-commerce platform, starting from the outdated website built on Magento through to the redesign and replatforming on Salesforce’s Commerce Cloud.

THE GOAL

Inspired by museum curation and guided by user-centric design, the new platform must be built with the right features for the right users. The aim was to create a trustworthy platform, showcasing our product like rare pieces of art, that solicits some kind of emotion from our customers and encourages them to engage with us online.

THE PROBLEM

The previous e-commerce platform was outdated, feature-lacking, and historically performed poorly. Our direct competitors were tech-focused and had feature-rich, engaging, and functional sites. The mismatch between the site functionality, business goals, and user needs needed to be addressed. The revenue numbers for the website were also the lowest source at the company. In the digital age, our brick-and-mortar stores were vastly outperforming the e-commerce site. Without taking sales from the physical stores, we needed to find a solution that would transform our e-commerce business into a high-performing revenue source.

THE SOLUTION

Inspired by museum curation and guided by user-centric design, the new platform is built with the right features for the right users. The aim was to create a trustworthy platform, showcasing our product like rare pieces of art, that solicits some kind of emotion from our customers and encourages them to engage with us online.

The overarching goals that guided the solution were:

create a platform that instills a sense of trust with the customer; the average price of an item is extremely high, so it is important that the user feels confident before transacting
draw inspiration from museum curation; our items are collectible, rare, and expensive so the items being the most important part of the page was imperative
increase conversion rate, increase e-commerce revenue, and increase engagement online
unlike many websites, our users were more engaged through desktop browsers as opposed to mobile → this greatly influenced the design

We utilized a variety of methods to gather insights and feedback from our users:

User Interviews + Surveys: information gathering to better understand user needs and to help create a baseline of requirements.
Focus Groups: Assembled a focus group made up of customers who shop online and in-store (and also live in the NY area) to understand reasons why they shop online versus in-store, and vice versa.
A/B Testing + Heat Mapping: for key screens including the PDP and PLP, I performed A/B testing using Optimizely to understand which version was preferred by users. I also used HotJar for heat mapping to better understand where users spend most of their time on the site.