Hury E-commerce — Case Study
Project Overview
Hury is a fashion brand from the south of Brazil that wants to launch its e-commerce website to start selling directly for consumers. Currently, the brand works in the B2B industry, providing garments for commercial partners using their own designs or using the designs provided by the clients. This project was developed by Jhessyka Freitas , Taise Comassetto and me.
The brand has higher pricing when compared to competitors, mainly because of the special fabrics used in the clothes, such as ecological and technological fabrics and that is one of the main points to have under consideration when designing as they want that value shown on the design.
Project Duration: 3 weeks
Tools Used: Figma and Photoshop
Role: Research, Information Architect, Branding, UI, Interaction Design, Prototyping, Visual Design
Research
Primary goals we had during the research:
- Understand Hury business complexity and expectations
- Understand consumers behavior when it comes to online fashion shopping
- Look in the market for references and best practices regarding e-commerce and other UX and UI trends that could apply to this project
Methods:
- Qualitative research — interview with the owner of the company and one employee who had a good understanding of the business
- Quantitative research — survey with 37 respondents
- Benchmarking — a comparison made with 5 main players in the market (some of them identified in the survey)
Findings:
One of the things that really caught our attention during the interview with the owner and the employee was the use of high-quality fabrics and how that was a big differentiation for the company when compared to other players in the market. Also, we understood a bit about the company business model which is a mid-size family company that has grown over the past … years due to innovation and delivering superior quality to the clients. As we could see those were important aspects of the company’s DNA that should really pop up in the design. So we decided to add some questions regarding the use of superior fabrics on our survey to understand if that was a decisive factor for the user or if it was something not so important for them
With the survey, we were able to discover a bit about which information was more important for consumers when buying online. The top 5 are:
- Consumer reviews
- Size table
- product description
- Delivery estimate
- Return policies
Added to that e also could understand a bit about the main challenges or problems users faced when shopping online in order to try to diminish them. We found that users were most afraid about the look and feel of the piece as well as shipping costs (in Brazil shipment service is usually very expensive) and return policies. We also discover that sustainable and technological fabrics were something the users valued and wanted to know about when purchasing fashion items.
We also took the survey opportunity to learn about the main fashion e-commerce the respondents used to shop in order to select some of them for our benchmarking.
Ideation
After putting together all that data and understanding the main pain points of users and checking the market for reference, it was time to create.
For this ideation process, we decided to go for a more straightforward approach by focusing primarily on the information architecture and categorization of the website. For that purpose, we created a user persona that would help us get a deeper understanding of the consumers and what type of information they would look for when entering a website.
By understanding better the user persona, — Bruna — her needs and frustrations we were able to dive into the sitemap. When thinking about the information architecture we considered it was important to highlight some unique aspects of the company, such as the special fabrics. For that purpose, we decided that the sustainable and technological fabrics would be both categories and tags that would facilitate for users to find those types of products as well as easily differentiate that product from the other, helping users identify the added value faster.
Mid-fidelity wireframes
Based on the findings and the site map proposed above, it was time to design the wireframes. As this is an MVP, we decided to make a purchasing experience flow, showing from the moment the user enters the website until the checkout as this is one of the most important flows users must go through on an e-commerce platform.
In that phase one of the things we prioritized was a no-log-in purchase experience, allowing the user to either log-in or not to finish the purchase, as this is one of the things that the research revealed as being a turn down for e-commerce shopping. Another important thing was to move the shipping calculator for the product page, in order to allow users to calculate the shipping costs before going to the checkout process.
Another detail that we decided to include was the information of the team involved in making that clothe piece. You can see that on LUSH products, for example. During our research, we found that customers values the origin of the products they purchase and that information adds value to the product, so that is something we included on the product page as well.
UI and high-fidelity prototype
In the high-fidelity prototype, we decided to go for a more minimalistic aesthetic, using black, white, and grey tones as the main colors and some pops of green. That aesthetic matches the more high ending target the brand wants to go for due to its pricing and positioning.
Next steps
This was a project that my group and I really enjoyed making and the result made us really proud about how the research informed the design. With that said, we would love to take some steps in the future in order to improve the project:
- Perform usability test with 5 users (test sheet is ready)
- Add more details to the checkout experience such as error and empty state screens
- Develop and test purchase history flux with delivery details and so on
