Helping her find items she ❤️'s

It's like Zoolander, but way better

Photo of app that says 'we pick for you'

Role

Senior Designer

Responsibilities

Information architecture, concept develpment, research

Team

1 Designer, 1 Engineer, 1 PM

Overview

Over Summer 2018, I helped Artizia, one of Canada's most reputable women's fashion houses, rethink their entire site navigation.

Information Architecture (IA) is serious business, the vast majority of sales on Aritzia.com are made through customers interacting with the site navigation, rather than through direct links or using search. When navigating through a site is confusing, it has a major impact on the bottom line.

My Role

I initially led a design team of three conducting a heuristic evaluation of Aritzia.com. The client loved the work so much they asked to bring me on as an individual contributor to lead their IA efforts. I helped to:

Run a team of three designers, one in Vancouver and two in India, to conduct a heuristic review
Plan and run activities to help baseline the existing navigation experience
Create and present research insights
Generate and test navigation variations
Create a future roadmap for implementation of navigation recommendations

Overall goal

Help women find items they love easily and efficiently

Toolkit

Sketch
UserZoom
Google Analytics
Axure

Evaluating and improving an experience

Problem

Aritzia has a hugely successful physical and online presence in Canada, often being seen as the pinnacle of women's clothing. The vast majority of their online growth had been driven organically i.e. through friends telling friends. Despite this growth, Aritzia had received anecdotal evidence that new customers (without any friend or family referrals) were often confused by how to browse the website and find products.

Approach

I initially led a team of three remote designers to conduct a heuristic evaluation of Aritiza.com. The heuristics were based on Nielsen's 10 Heuristics for User Interface Design but I expanded and edited them so that they were more relatable to a fashion client. We focused on two main areas of the site:

Product Discovery and Search; evaluating the search, browse, and navigation experience
Product Evaluation; evaluating the product and shopping bag experience

We identified two broad areas and themes for improvement: communicating the brand and creating tools for the customer.

We also delved deeper into every area of the site and identified usability improvements. Each improvement was also assigned an impact score to help prioritization efforts.

This piece of work impressed the client so much that they asked me to lead a project with the goal of redefining their entire site navigation. I conducted some brief, quick research with loyal customers of Aritzia and created an experience map to help stakeholders understand where the pain points and opportunities were.

Once I achieved alignment with the client with what areas of the site redesigning navigation could help improve, I went deeper into IA research.

Baseline, vary, test and then do it again

I delved into Aritzia's Google Analytics and realised that the main problem areas seemed to be categories that were ambiguously titled or used Aritzia specific terminology such as The Super Puff, Back to school and Features. To verify this and help baseline the experience, I planned and conducted tree test and card sort exercises with customers.

Running a card sort exercise on Aritzia.com's navigation

Once I understood the as-is situation, I created a three variations to test. I also ran a card sort exercise with internal stakeholders. This helped the business understand the discrepancy between their understanding of the navigation and their customer's.

Creating hypotheses using customer and stakeholder insights

Insights from the three variations tested

Finally, I designed concepts for the future navigation based on all the research learnings.

The reimagined navigation

Result

In eight weeks we conducted: a heuristic review, baseline assessment of the nav, a stakeholder nav workshop, tested nav variations and created future design concepts
Aritzia went on to implement the navigation designs over the course of a few months and saw an increase in their first time customer conversion
The client were coached on how to run a robust and repeatable IA exercise

Learnings

IA output (card sorts, tree tests etc.) can often be hard to describe to people who aren't familiar with the topic. I found that laying it all out as plainly as possible, with examples, made it much easier to consume. An example of this is just taking a snippet of the entire tree and annotating it with insights on the baseline and variation performance.
Often as designers, we want to simplify designs so that they are understandable to everyone who uses a product. I found that with Fashion there is often a sense of pride in finding an item when no-one else can't. One customer described it as 'If you know, you know.' In the future, it would be interesting to explore this concept more and understand how to strike a balance between retaining loyal customers who enjoy 'gaming' the system and attracting new ones.