Translating the guidance of a store visit into a concierge digital experience
Client The Shade Store | Role Experience Architect
The Shade Store is a family owned business and leader in custom made window treatments. They pride themselves on Custom Made Simple®, making the process accessible with curated service from inspiration to installation and beyond. They asked Capgemini to help them extend this philosophy to their ecommerce site as well as position the brand as “approachable premium/luxury”.
This project was a design discovery ahead of a larger technical replatforming project and I worked with a creative designer to help develop the UX and content strategy for the future site. I was responsible for leading stakeholder workshops, creating wireframes and collaboriting on strategy and ensuring final comps met usability best practice.
The Approach
A key strategy was to simplify the complex purchase process and engage consumers as an extension of the in-store experience. We accomplished this by developing a design that introduced a variety of guided selling techniques to both inspire and educate consumers.
Onsite Discovery Process
We spent several days on location with The Shade Store family (literally - they are a family owned business) in order to learn about their brand, process and business needs.
In between workshops we walked through a typical customer experience in the flagship store and interviewed design consultants on how they used the site for quotes and configurations. We also spent time in their swatch warehouse to see breadth of fabrics they offer.
Stakeholder Workshops
I lead stakeholders through a series of workshops to help us balance user goals with business needs and map out some basic user flows to serve as the foundation for our UX/Content strategy.
Content Strategy
It was important to present the customer with the right information at the right point in their shopping journey. Too much information and they would be overwhelmed, but not enough and they would become frustrated.
We crafted shopping-enabled content pages that allowed the customer to start where they were comfortable from learning about technical aspects, to being inspired, to selecting fabrics. Everything was interconnected and worked to seamlessly advance them down the shopping funnel.
Homepage: Inspiration & Brand Value
The homepage needed to feel like walking into a store and being greeted by a stylist. Balancing large inspirational imagery with informative icons allow the customer to both begin to browse and understand what The Shade Store is about.
Stories: Inspirational Content & Commerce
We introduced the concept of “Stories.” Long-form content pages with large, rich visuals that the customer can shop. Like that window treatment? Here is the product, fabric and styling. Save it or continue to customize. Frictionless for the customer and encouraging more engagement and conversion for the business.
Discovering Fabrics
While there are only a handful of products there is a seemingly infinite (actually around 1300) selection of materials to choose from. How can you tell the exact shade or texture on a screen? How does this material filter light, or does it? How will it look in my room?
We wanted to provide an elevated fabric browsing experience that allows the customer to shop by their need, filter down to a manageable amount of options and easily have swatches arrive at their door.
Fabrics: Landing Page
A starting point for the customer to understand that they can order swatches, the premium nature of The Shade Store product and either start filtering or browse some inspiration.
Fabrics: Multiple Ways to Browse
Whether by product, mood, or collection we crafted experiences to help the customer get inspired and move forward in their shopping journey.
User Experience Strategy & Frictionless Usability
Configuring window treatments can be complicated and cumbersome (which is why the guidance of a consultant in-store is usually necessary). One of the major challenges of this project was solving for how to simplify the process enough to give customers the confidence to purchase custom, large ticket items online.
Navigation
We optimized site header and navigation menu based on best practice and workshop inputs. We introduced multiple entry points into the shopping journey depending on the customer’s goals.
Pricing Assistant: Custom Price & Quick Quotes
Created a user-friendly flyout tool to help customers understand pricing, enter their window size to see more accurate pricing throughout the site and generate a quick quote that could be saved or printed. This was key feature that empowers users during the shopping journey while also providing a lead-generation tool for design consultants.
Product Configurator: Guided Experience
We separated the fun process of choosing your product and fabric from the more cumbersome and challenging act of actually configuring the details of the shade, keeping customers in their comfort zone longer and providing an option to save progress if they need time to consider options. Once they’ve made a purchase decision, the technical aspects of configuration are presented in small, manageable chunks to prevent them from becoming overrwhelmed.
In Closing
The Shade Store team was excited about these designs, but unfortunately they were completed as the COVID-19 pandemic began, so implementation is currently on hold.
Credits: Mike Davidson (Creative Director), Megan Johnson (UI/Visual Design)
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