Windsor Redesign
A new fashion e-commerce experience
*Disclaimer: This has no affiliation with Windsor & was used in an educational setting
Introduction
Windsor is a leading special occasion & fast fashion retailer with 300+ U.S.-based stores & a fast growing e-commerce business. Their mission statement since 1937 is one that continues to this day - “Create an Oasis That Inspires and Empowers Women” - by focusing on making beauty accessible to all women & giving a broad selection of on-trend apparel for all the occasions in a woman’s life.
Although their business model encourages engagement with the online social community & uses influencers to build traffic & boost brand awareness, somehow their online presence has flown under. the radar. Online sales make up only 20% of Windsor’s total business.
The Challenge
Here are key problems with the core experience behind Windsor’s current website:
Defining The Problem
“How might we redesign the most popular pages to create an online shopping experience that is more engaging & interactive?”
The Solution
A redesign of Windsor’s key pages in a way that maintains the brand’s visual identity while subtly enhancing online shopping for consumers.
Our Users
Qualitative Research
Before sketching out ideas for potential features, I conducted 10 short user interviews to collect behavioral & purchase data of current Windsor customers, & narrow down pain points they face when navigating through the store’s website.
Personas
Windsor’s core customers are Gen Z & Millennial women, aged 16-34 years. I came up with 1 persona that represents this core client base & pain points from the data trends shown above.
Market Research
I inspected online stores of 5 clothing brands my users mentioned using the most other than Windsor.
The takeaway was that while most of these competitors do a good job communicating their brand identity, the customer experience is undermined by poor UI, unclear categorization, & overwhelming landing pages that distract the user. This was an opportunity for areas to improve on with the Windsor redesign.
Defining Goals & Features
Goals
These 3 goals helped set me up for a solution, as in real life, product design is a mix of user needs, project feasibility, & business viability.
MVP Feature Requirements
Process
Sketches
Displayed are some initial rapid sketch ideas I drew with the Ideate app on my iPad for the home, catalog, & product pages.
LoFi Wireframes
Using Sketch, I transformed my drawings into the low fidelity wireframes depicted below:
Design System
As I moved on to turn my wireframes into high fidelity mockups, I first identified Windsor’s existing design system by inspecting their site via Chrome DevTools. From my user interviews, a key insight was that customers strongly identify with the fun & feminine feel, as they often shop at Windsor for special occasions in their life.
For this reason, I only made changes to the UI that helped make the interface more clean & modern, while still capturing the overall tone. I stuck to the same style guide; however, I updated a few components like buttons & item cards as shown below since the idea was to improve the user experience & not transform the look.
Final Results
Final Results
Due to time constraints, only my hifi prototypes were tested with 3 of the previously interviewed participants remotely via Zoom. All users agreed on the following positive feedback:
Usability Testing
I’m glad I received an overall positive response to my redesign results, indicating I made the shopping experience more enjoyable & efficient for Windsor customers. Because of the project timeframe, I didn’t get to implement everything I originally planned. Here are action items I would consider next & some other learnings:
Insights & Improvements
Future Steps
I would include designs for checking out an item to complete the entire online shopping flow & work on a responsive design to have a consistent multi-device experience. I would also be interested to partner with Windsor to measure how my design solution could impact their business with tangible KPIs such as percentage of online sales, number of daily visits to their site, etc.
Challenges
Keeping the brand’s identity while making changes to improve usability was definitely an interesting design challenge. Often, redesign projects focus on changing the entire look of a product without actually solving usability issues. Hence, I strived to balance these aspects without sacrificing the tone that users claim to love about Windsor, & this was a valuable learning experience. Other challenges faced include ensuring the images extracted from Windsor’s website still had a high quality resolution & limitations with Sketch when it came to prototyping, which is why I made the decision to switch to Adobe XD for the final stage of creating high fidelity mockups.
What I Learnt
Although this redesign may seem simplistic, small details can significantly impact how users interact with an interface & how much an online business grows.
