Well known for their successful brick and mortar stores, Mirror is answering the demand from customers to shop their ever-changing inventory online. The challenge for Mirror is to create an accessible, easy to use website for their diverse customers.
Project Goals
Background
With over 400 stores in 32 countries, Mirror’s clothing appeals to the masses, by offering affordable, fast-fashion to women, children, and men, of all ages and styles.
Project goals were to give the Mirror brand a fresh face to wear on their new responsive, e-commerce website, while easily allowing customers to browse and filter through large catalog of products.
Research Goals
During the 6-week timeline, I conducted market research and consumer interviews to determine the best way to create an optimal, accessible, online shopping experience. By engaging with customers through surveys, interviews, and card sorting, along with benchmark analysis, I evaluated patterns and behaviors of users help to create actionable solutions for Mirror’s website.
Research Findings
Data & Discovery
Competitor benchmark analysis showed that innovative tech has a huge influence on consumers, by offering predictive auto complete in searches, contextual navigation, and UI digital sophistication, especially for fast-fashion e-commerce markets. Personalization creates major conversion rates with product recommendations.
Customer interview responses revealed the wants, needs and paint points for consumers. Needing quality clothing at an affordable price that fits well was valued by all participants. Wanting consistant sizing, easy to use filters and a variety of product images was also consistant. Pain points primarily consisted of waiting for shipping, availability of sizes and paying for return shipping.
Wants: Consistant sizing, easy to use filters, and a variety of product images
Needs: Quality clothing, affordable price, fits well
Motivations: Comfortable, attractive, trendy clothing
Frustrations: Waiting for shipping, availability of sizes and paying for return shipping.
Personas & Site Development
Constructing an empathy map really helped to define the users behavioral and emotional patterns when shopping online. Developing personas from the empathy map was really fun and challenging. I felt like I became friends with the personas, and wanted to find the best solutions based on their behaviors.
User & Task Flows
Establishing a basic user flow, helped me to further iterate what other actions the personas might take in a task flow. I created a potential scenario for each of the personas, outlining which actions they might take to complete a task. Having an understanding of how the personas would complete a task, the requirements for the User Interface became clear. I created an outline detailing which pages are necessary to allow users to successfully complete tasks.
Define
Card Sorting & Site Map
By sorting cards into categories that made the most sense to them, participants showed me how to better organize potential categories and subcategories for the site.
I was surprised by participants who categorized the items with more abstract labels, such as “The Trendy Millenial.” This affirmed my hypothesis of needing to add labels such as ‘Collections’ and ‘New Arrivals’.
Design
Wireframes
After iterating with sketches, I created digital wireframes helped to further layout the website. Using the same grid, I created responsive pages for tablet and mobile.
Branding
Based on user feedback, a reputable brand is easily recognized and signifies quality. I chose colors effectively convey the brands core values, uncomplicated and approachable. Blue Sapphire is the primary color, which is reliable and steadfast. Golden Brown offers a sense of flare, fashion, and refinement. The photos below reflect the brand perfectly, representing casual, fun, and classic-yet-trendy fashion.
User Testing
Building the prototype was the most fun, and challenging part of the whole project. I was pushed outside of my comfort zone to create a working prototype that would be tested against solving users problems. I used Zoom to connect with my participants and recorded the session while they tested out my prototype. It was really exciting to see everything come together and watch the participants easily solve the problems. The testing revealed a few tweaks that needed to be made, and the final prototype was handed off.