Littleton Jewelry | Case Study
Littleton Jewelry | CASE STUDY
The Client
Littleton Jewelry is a local family-owned jewelry store in the suburb of Denver, CO that is ready to conquer national market and adapt the eCommerce model for their business. They pride themselves in family-friendly attitude and personalized approach to each customer.
Littleton Jewelry mainly sells jewelry in their physical store. The lockdowns and social distancing reduced the number of sales significantly, and the founder decided to attract more customers to their website and start selling jewelry nationwide. The current website already showcased the inventory, but there was no option to purchase directly on the website.
I needed to develop an online shop page that will allow the business to sell their products online while maintaining a brand image: “small shop” appeal and and great customer service. Improving current website to make the pages consistent was another important task. The deliverables to include user research and a high fidelity prototype.
In this project I was a sole UX/UI designer and I completed it within 2 weeks.
Contextual Inquiries, User Interviews, Competitive Analysis, Card Sort, User Flow, Usability Tests, Sketches, Wireframes, Prototyping (Design Tool: Figma)
THE RESEARCH PROCESS
I performed Littleton Jewelry current website audit to understand how the business was presenting itself on the local market. I made some evaluations and came up with the hypothesis of possible pain points.
01. Contextual Inquiries
We conducted contextual interviews with 5 users who were given 2 tasks on the website: to find and purchase a bottle of wine to their liking, and to become a member of the Wine Club.
The Main Takeaways
- Poor description of the items
- Not enough photos to showcase the product
- Filters didn’t work or work poorly
- There were no prices or reviews on the website
02. User Interviews
I also interviewed 5 users about jewelry shopping, and I found that these criteria are important to them : other clients reviews, price, price delivery, return conditions, precise informations on the product (size, material).
When customers go to a shop it’s because they need an advice or to try the jewel. It concerns value purchase because the risk of doing a wrong choice is bigger.
The collected insights were used to develop personas, and understand what information to prioritize designing the eCommerce feature.
03. Competitive & Comparative Analysis
Competitive and comparative analysis based on four competitors – Matheu’s, Trice, Walmart Jewelry, and Amazon Jewelry.
Through Competitive and Comparative Analysis I discovered that most competitors had:
- Easy and clear navigation systems
- Intuitive product categories
- Multiple filter options to single out only related products
- Clear and extensive product description with minimum of 3 photos per product
Littleton Jewelry has a lot of potential but its website doesn’t reflect the real essence of the brand. Redesigning the website will be an opportunity to bring the brand to a new level and attract more customers. To do this, I had to reprioritize the information and add the essential elements that were missing with the goal to enable successful online purchases.
04. DEVELOPING A PERSONA
From the research findings, I defined the persona – Jane. She is a careful critic and always reads the reviews, product description, and pays attention to how easy it is to return the product in case it doesn’t fit.
05. PROBLEM STATEMENT AND HMW
I synthesized all the research and defined the problems statement: Mila needs a better way to shop for jewelry online because she would like to support local small businesses.
How Might I improve Jane’s jewelry selection process? How Might I supply Jane with all necessary tools to make her search and checkout process easier and quicker?
06. Information Architecture
Before I started to sketch my concept, I rebuilt the Information Architecture of the website. Some items in the global navigation needed to be renamed because they were not clear enough to fit to customers’ mental model, and besides but they weren’t at the right place.To do this, I had conducted an open card sort with 11 users. The findings helped me redesign the global navigation and made the search more intuitive.
06. USER FLOW
I chose to focus on this happy path – the two tasks for our persona Jane was to a) find an engagement ring and add it to the cart and b) pick a pair of best-selling earrings and then purchase those two items.
THE DESIGN PROCESS
06. from SKETCHES to first prototype
When I felt that I had enough research to back up my design decisions, I started with sketching. I needed to visualize the big picture quickly, so I won't be sharing my horrible sketches in order to prevent you from nightmares, dear reader 🙂
Design Decisions
As mentioned previously, contextual interviews and user interviews revealed that the navigation needed to be improved as it wasn’t intuitive. This new navigation showed all product categories that could be accessed quickly through the navigation bar.
When users were on the shop page, they unanimously reported that current filter and sort options were not helpful when it came to finding the right product. I made improvements by adding more relevant options to enable the shoppers find desired jewelry in a more efficient way.
07. Usability testing and Iterations
After creating interactive grayscale prototype, I conducted 5 usability tests and discovered that some additional improvements were needed:
- Adding cart icon to the homepage for easy access to the shopping cart
- Adding reviews to individual product page
- Moving my account | wishlist to the right side of the page
08. The Design System
To build the design style tile I decided to go with pink color palette as the color pink is thought to be a calming color associated with love, kindness, and femininity.
The Littleton Jewelry logo, due to research findings, had a corporate vibe, so I redesigned it. I picked a script font as its hand-written nature would be more suitable for a family-owned small business like this one and to also provoke ideas of femininity, elegance, and creativity.
09. Final Prototype
I iterated on my designs and reflected the changes in a high-fidelity prototype. Testing had a high success rate – all 7 users completed the tasks in minimal time with no errors.
The biggest challenge for me in this project was to translate the main research findings into UI solutions, and due to the time constrains I needed to prioritize which changes to work on first.
Click to watch the video of the interactive prototype below:
The biggest challenge for me in this project was to translate the main research findings into UI solutions, and due to the time constrains I needed to prioritize which changes to work on first.
NEXT STEPS
Thanks to my redesign, Littleton Jewelry has a solid base to improve and to go further in the costumer experience.
Here are the features we would like to develop:
- improve the description of the inventory so the right item becomes even easier to find
- explore the VR to improve customer experience by offering them to try the product on though their smartphone
- redesign other pages so they are more consistent with the new branding
Thank you for reading!