Now with intentions of positioning their business outside Colombia and become stronger within the country, La Vie redesigns their brand aiming to clean the online buying process and increase key performance indicators. As a result of this, One Half appears as an answer to the need to stand out from new international competitors as the brand opens to new markets and respond to existing demands: having a site with a clear navigation process and even better performance compared to earlier experiences both in search engines and conversion.
LaVie was a womens clothing brand, well positioned in the colombian social media commerce market, on the prior year they had take the step to e-commerce accompanied by me. Soon, the opportunity to start selling overseas appeared, and as they checked the possibility, found the existence of many businesses with the same name that made the process of positioning that brand in new markets way harder, having landed in this discovery they saw that change was necessary and comissioned to an advertising agancy their brand’s redesign, and to me, the redesign of the websitewe had made a year before.
Placing all points that came up in the brainstorming session on a priority diagram, helped us define what was completely necessary for launch and what would be approached down the road. A great advantage of this redesign is that the brand was aiming to simplify the experience in order to make it easier for the user to get to the end result, this decision was made after finding out through heat maps and user session replay that parts of the site weren’t being used and they could affect overall performance.
Name: Alejandra
Age: 31
Occupation: Dentist
Alejandra is a dental health professional that her own practice, she is in the middle of building digital presence for her brand as a dentist mainly in social media, that is why she is always looking for outfits that go with the relaxed-chic style she wants to convey.
Name: Diana
Age: 28
Occupation: Nurse
Diana works long hours at a surgery service, when the weekend arrives she doesn’t want to know anything about nursing uniforms, so she looks for comfort clothes that help her feel good about her body, she also works out at nights, for this she looks for sports clothes that help her battle cold weather.
We checked different brands that are direct One Half’s competition and have strong social media presence together with a solid e-commerce.
We found that the simpler process we pretended to apply in order to optimize and ease the search-buy product dynamic was hard to find without it having parts where the process became oversaturated with options.
Some of the key differences we found in comparison to our pretended experience were:
At this point we started building a basic user flow, in order to clarify the product purchase process. This helped us understand how would the user interacts on each touchpoint with the product as well as pointing goals throughout the navigation process.
After having sketched wireframes to find the structure of information on each screen and thinking out possible navigation routes, we revised what elements were necessary, which were not and what zones needes to improve somehow. We took our time in this point of the process to check as a team, thoroughly, that all the elements defined in the UX had their place before starting the final UI design.
Building a simpler navigation experience for people was one of the main focuses of this redesign, coming from this fact, in all pages where ther was product placement (home, categories and the product page itself) we seeked to reduce selection and secondary funtions, we came from having a wide social sharer “addthis” style and the option to have a favorite products list, to only allowing sharing through facebook and whatsapp.
Making informed decisions is important, that is why when we found that the category pages were the second type of content with more visits, we knew that taking advantage of this knowledge would benefit visit time and number of clicks made by each user through placing this sort of cross sale spot.
We found that organic traffic had a lot of opportunities for improvement, so one of the big focus points when coding the new layout was bearing in mind all of Google’s Lighthouse recommendations.
During the first month after launching the redesign (December 2020), we kept close watch from Google Analytics to the sites users behaviour and had very good findings at the end of the month, when comparing to the immediate last month with the old design, we checked improvement and set a route to keep improving through iterating the design. To this day, metrics continue improving and on the rise.
This experience allowed me to experiment making thorough project development for a bigger brand than usual, I was challenged in each aspect as the client expected high quality results. In the user experience field gave me the opportunity to research and gain insights with new tools that I continued using on my day to day work and freelance projects. On UI Design it allowed me to make informed decisions and work with a client that was always open to place those decisions over their personal taste in order to favor results. In the development field it drove me to dig way deeper into Shopify than ever, also working in a more organized manner that ultimately favored performance.