About the Project
Choice is a retail store for traditional Indian women’s clothing in Ludhiana, Punjab, India owned by my family. It’s been running for almost 40 years now. I wanted to develop an e-commerce platform for our business targeted specifically at our customers who live outside of India. This was also my senior project at Centennial College during the Interactive Media Management program.
The Problem
The current options in the online sector of traditional Indian women’s clothing are either too expensive (out of budget) or way too unorganized.
TIMELINE
June- August 2022
TOOLS
Figma, Google Docs, Google Forms
MY ROLE
UX Researcher
UX/UI Designer
Current Market Scenario
An in-depth market research was carried out before starting with the design process. The current Indian women’s clothing online market scenario can be divided into two parts, organised and unorganised.
Organised
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Businesses which have dedicated e-commerce platforms.
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Most of these platforms brand themselves as ‘luxury’ platforms and are hence unaffordable for most users.
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A lot of these platforms don’t have the best user experience with pages not loading and the product being not easy to navigate.
Unorganised
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Businesses which sell their products through social media platforms like Facebook and Instagram.
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They post pictures and videos of their products and take orders through DMs or Whatsapp.
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There is a big issue of trust and reliability in this sector. Users have sometimes received different products than what they were shown and at times not received anything at all.
User Interviews
User interviews were with some of our existing customers. This was done to gain information on what platforms our customers were currently using while shopping online and if they were facing any issues while doing so.
SAMPLE QUESTIONS
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Do you currently use any online platforms to purchase Indian clothing?
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If yes, then could you name some of those platforms?
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What device do you primarily use while doing online shopping?
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How has your overall experience been while using such platforms and have you faced any issues while using them?
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What are some of the things you’d like to see if Choice came up with their own e-commerce platform?
Research Findings
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Users want an easy to use platform which is also reliable and trustworthy.
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Users would like a platform which provides products at affordable prices.
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There is currently a huge gap in the market for a platform like this.
User Personas
With the insight from user interviews, two personas were prepared to match our target users.
Ideation
The aim with this product is to give the users an experience which closely resembles an in-store shopping experience. Keeping that and the findings from the user interviews in mind, I came up with two ideas which I wanted to introduce in this product.
Virtual Appointment
This feature will let the customers get the help and advice of stylists in picking their outfit. A portion of our current customer base is not familiar with using e-commerce platforms, especially the ones who currently shop online from social media platforms. This feature will help us in getting them familiarized with the new platform.
Custom Tailoring
The concept of having standard sizes is not very prevalent in the wedding industry in India. Instead, customers want products that are tailor made and fit them perfectly. To help with this, there will be a custom tailoring option in most of the wedding wear products on the platform.
There will also be an option to get the length altered for the regular products along with the default sizing options.
Let's Start Designing
After the research phase, I went into figjam and started sketching ideas of what the app layout would look like. The main idea behing this was to figure out which primary elemts to display on the home screen.
I was also thinking of different ways of product categorisation and how to divide them into certain sections making it easier for the users to find the right product in less time.
LOW FIDELITY WIREFRAMES
Medium Fidelity Prototype
I designed the 2 main user flows during this process. Purchasing a product and booking a virtual appointment. The aim was to get a few users to test these flows and then proceed to the high fidelity prototype keeping the user feedback in consideration.
BOOK VIRTUAL APPOINTMENT
PURCHASE A PRODUCT
User Feedback
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Most users were able to complete the ‘purchasing a product’ journey smoothly.
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Some users found the virtual appointment pop-up to be too information heavy and also felt that some steps needed more explaining.
UI Style Guide
High Fidelity Prototype
The following section will showcase the the final visual design, prototypes and design decisions taken with keeping the business and usability goals in mind.
HOME PAGE
When a user lands on the home page, they’ll see the banner for the latest collection or products with a CTA to shop it. They’ll also see the ‘shop by category’ section which will be one of the most used sections by the users to find the product they are looking for.
You’ll also notice throughout the app that the main focus and emphasis is on the Product Pictures. This is because in our industry, how a product looks is the most important factor in the decision making process of the customer.
BOTTOM NAVIGATION BAR
The bottom navigation bar was designed keeping the most essential top level destinations in mind. The number of elements and the minimum touch size for each of them were also decided keeping the accessibility guidelines in consideration.
The active page in the navigation bar is highlighted with the app’s primary colour while the other elements are greyed out to indicate an inactive state.
Home- The home button was placed in the nav bar to help users find their way back to the homepage from anywhere in the app. This decision was made especially keeping our older target audience in mind, ensuring they don’t get confused while browsing through the app.
Favorites- This page contains a list of all the products that the user has tapped ‘add to favorites’ or ‘heart’ icon on. This was placed in the nav bar to provide quick access to those products in case if the user decides to place on order for one of those products.
Whatsapp- Tapping on this button will direct the user to our store’s whatsapp account. This is placed in the nav bar since whatsapp is the main mode of communication in our industry and it’s the platform where we resolve all our customer queries.
Virtual Shop- Tapping on this button will direct the user to the virtual appointment page where they can schedule a video call with one of the stylists. This has been placed in the nav bar because it is one of our unique features and it will be really useful in helping customers.
My Account- This page gives the user to option to access and edit their account information, saved addresses, payment methods, past orders, etc.
PRODUCT PAGE
SEARCH BY INPUT
VIRTUAL APPOINTMENT
SORT AND FILTER EXPERIENCE
The app allows users to sort and filter products based on their preferences.
The users can sort products based on popularity, date, price and discount. They can filter products on the basis of categories, sub-categories, color, fabric, price, size and ocassion.
CUSTOM TAILORED FEATURE
CHECKOUT PROCESS
My Learnings
Conceptualising and designing an entire platform from start to finish was an amazing learning experience. This was also the first time I went beyond just the design and also focussed on the Business plan, Promotional tactics and SEO strategy.
In an attempt to optimise the design process as much as possible, I made use of a lot of features such as components, auto layout and having a dedicated design system. All this was done to ensure that the platform had a common theme across all pages and it would also make it easier to implement any changes in the future.
This was also my first time designing a product while keeping the accessibility guidelines in consideration.