Artful Home
How might we simplify our product discovery and modernize our digital transaction experience?
Introduction
Overview
Artful Home is an online and print retailer that brings exceptional works of fine art, craft, apparel, and design to your home. Artful Home helps artists get exposure by curating and selling their work to ship directly from their studios to your home.
My contributions
I partnered with marketing to address accessibility and drop-off data with user testing to understand our baseline, ideation for enhanced design solutions, and validation for user testing on new designs.
Notable deliverables: design ideation, wireframes, interactive prototypes, user research analysis
Timeline
2-months
Role
Graphic Designer (UI Designer)
Problem
While merchandisers curate collections in digital and print marketing campaigns, online products exceed 20,000 in offerings and can be overwhelming for customers to navigate, add to basket, and checkout effectively.
An increase in call volume created a need to enhance our user experience to help customers navigate product offerings, address basket abandonment rates, and create more transparency on transaction and shipping communications.
Goals
01
User research
To discover why customers are dropping off in basket checkout.
Increase customer retention
02
Web compliant
To define enhancements to be American Disability Act (ADA) compliant.
Platform modernization
03
Experience consistency
To standardize our Content Management System (CMS) templates for merchandisers and customer care to maintain.
Platform modernization
Constraints
Critical
Business support and operations are the priority over supporting experience enhancements.
Recurring website, email, and print campaigns continuously challenged our team’s velocity to focus on experience enhancements. As 1 of 2 designers, I had competing priorities with maintaining design operations for new digital campaigns and graphic design production for catalog and marketing emails.
When design capacity became available to support enhancements, technology partners were unavailable as their focus was primarily on the platform stability of our e-commerce site and content management system. Ultimately, executive decisions informed the urgency and priority to implement experience enhancements to both client and artist users.
Waterfall methodology
Research
I partnered with our Marketing Director to conduct ten unmoderated user interviews with 5 participants for our apparel and decor segments. We conducted surveys to understand our customers’ interests in apparel and decor to narrow down known competitor brands based on customer interests.
Methods
Our screening criteria focused on women over 35 years, living in a household income greater than $150K, who have experience ordering online, and are interested in artist-made products. We focused on discovering customer insights regarding product discovery, descriptions, images, reviews, themes of shipping, and basket checkout with usertesting.com.
Key findings
Apparel
- Themes: size, style, type, sleeve length, fabric & care, fit, return policy
- 3 of 5 users clicked on primary navigation apparel & shoes – dresses
- 2 of 5 users refined their search by sleeve length, collection, size
- “It gives you different views, so that’s good, color swatches, fabric, which was my concern, care instructions, fit & sizing. It has everything you pretty much need. I can’t think of anything!”
- “Shipping is a little on the high side. I never understood why that is. I’ve never understood shipping rates by what you order (the amount). It should be a standard rate on something at this price. Do free shipping.”
- “My only concern is the cost of shipping, should be free or included.”
Decor
- Themes: size, colors, material, price, shipping, return policy, framing
- 5 of 5 users clicked on primary navigation – art for the wall
- 4 of 5 users refined their search by type, size, color, price
- “I wish you could pick multiple colors at once instead of having to go back in and pick more orange-gold.”
- “How many drawings are on this page…oh, there are only two pages I can go through and not do more filtering.”
- “I think what would be cool is a photo to show how it looks on a physical wall, even if it’s not the wall in your house, just on a wall with some furniture to compare size.”
User insights
Userflow
User personas
Catherine Comfy
“I like clothes that are not only stylish but relaxed and extremely comfortable.”
About
Catherine is a mature, experienced woman who lives an ordered but not ordinary life. She is full of information and sometimes surprises you. She is dependable and makes an effort to express herself through art.
Goals
- To find new products that catch her attention and are handcrafted and unique
- To accessorize her outfits with handcrafted jewelry that is bold and artistic
- To be able to shop based on sleeve lengths, colors, and material
- To be able to review fabric and care instructions before purchasing clothes
- To be able to find clothing that is easy to pack and travel
Activities
- Enjoys shopping at local boutiques as well as online
- Browses for decor and apparel artwork with both images and navigation
- Reads reviews and return policies to determine purchase
- Starts completely new search instead of clicking beyond three-page results
Frustrations
- She needs more images and details on models to imagine what a dress would look like on her physique.
- Shipping cost should be part of pricing since she does not understand the fixed price with the product’s weight.
- She cannot select more than one color at a time in her product search.
Solution
Bootstrap Visual Language
Color tokens, inputs, buttons, typography, and other reusable components
Key features
Product discovery
Global navigation & search facets
Global components
Design system upgrade
Triggered emails
Event-driven dynamic emails
Key screens
Homepage
Latest curated artwork collections
Category landing page
Secondary links for artwork category
View all artwork
Enhanced label groups by category
Refine search
Add/remove filter criteria
Basket checkout
Artwork transaction overview
Shipping information
Delivery range, special instructions and gift messages
Billing information
Select forms of payment
Order confirmation
Triggered event for transaction emails
Transaction updates
Transparency for clients on expected delivery arrivals
Welcome series
Invitation to receive print catalog and other exclusive email content
Marketing campaigns
Examples of weekly emails per client segment
Reflection
While I transitioned roles to pursue another opportunity, some next potential steps I would take include:
Next steps
- Partner with technology and the business to collaborate on design feasibility from the user research study.
- Explore Software as a Service (SaaS) Integrations for rendering Augmented Reality (AR) with artwork at home.
- Expand chat capabilities to support image uploads to process reimbursements for damaged artwork shipments.
Takeaways
Invest time in building a working relationship with the team you’re working with and the impacting users.
Request as much existing usage data as possible to guide discovery and analysis for new scope on unmet user needs.
Other bits from this experience:
- Maintain an active competitor analysis to propose A/B tests for ongoing enhancements for competitive advantages.
- Documentation is critical to maintaining alignment between customer needs and business goals.