“Incredibly fun!
An amazing place! Its so much fun just to browse. They have everything! You can purchase or rent. The customer service is awesome. They are fun, have great ideas, and can make you madonna in any video, or Michael Jackson or Princess Elsa! We loved it there.”
-Holly, Boston MA via Tripadvisor.com
Lucy in Disguise with Diamonds Online Store
Scope | Mobile Responsive Ecommerce experience
Tools | Sketch, Pen & Paper
Time | 2 weeks
Team | Jessi Willey
Role | Research, Information Architecture, User Interviews, Ideation & Iteration, Implementation
A local Austin favorite!
Why not shop online?
The Challenge
While Lucy’s Instagram digital presence is prominent and well developed, they do not have a consistent website to match dedicated to purchasing their wide variety of items online for their customers.
The Opportunity
This project focuses on designing an eCommerce site for my client by achieving user-centered design methodologies, comparative analysis, prototyping, usability testing, and iteration.
History
Lucy’s is a brick and mortar store favorite amongst Austin Texas locals. They have an excellent branding strategy focusing on supporting their creative and knowledgeable staff to promote fun costumes and accessories using Instagram. This is a hallmark of what makes Lucy in Disguise a people-centric business and is one of the main pillars of their branding strategy and business model.
Lucy’s Ideal Customer
Meet Daniella
Daniella is a 63 yr old HR manager who has made a career of helping and coaching others. While she loves what she does professionally, Daniella has found enrichment in life by coaching young people to harness their creative confidence in local theatre and art. Daniella is a powerhouse of resources, and like many of our users, wants to find her ‘go-to’ to shop, share, and promote for her creative costuming needs
Daniella will refer Lucy’s to others based on:
Clean layout with clear choices
Fair pricing and featured sale items
Record of past purchases stored in a customer account option
Customer service options like phone, email, and live chat
One of Daniella’s favorite retail experiences is the experience of IKEA. Here’s why.
They value feedback
Ikea wants to hear what you think about the experiences they’ve created to iterate improvements.
Guiltless returns
Ikea makes sure you know its ok to not like your purchase before you return an item.
They are friendly
They model their business on excellent customer service and a friendly helpful tone/voice.
Comparative Analysis
Lucy in Disguise had an extensive amount of information on their landing site about their rental and retail services, costume characters provided, and location, they lack a clear way of purchasing inventory in a pleasantly digestible way.
It was important by starting to define Lucy’s inventory.
Designating product categories into a simple shallow taxonomy structure.
Simplified product categories: Adult Costumes | Childrens Costumes | Pet Costumes | Accessories
Navigation that can filter into additional subcategories
Information Architecture
A user flow of sample tasks was created.
Iterations happened before, during and after user testing.
Additional user flows focused on purchasing an item.
The focus from the initial user flows guided user tasks to test revolving around the checkout process.
3 User Tasks
Add a pet costume for your beloved to the shopping cart.
Proceed with the purchase of that item.
Contact customer service to change your shipping option to expedite delivery.
Key Usability Insights
Wayfinding the home page and shopping cart with prominence.
Clear visual navigation flow through the site.
Direct language use and prompting
One page to do all the steps with the fewest amount of click-throughs for purchasing.
An example of clear and direct language required changing the customer service prompt
Lucy’s mobile eCommerce experience
Customer service is priority
Takeaway
It was important to realize that based on usability testing and feedback, taxonomy was in continual iteration at the sublevels through the process of iteration in all main stages based on the user.
What I Learned
Continual iterations as a process throughout were crucial to the growth of the project.
Usability Testing roots the “why” and drives the functionality through creation to validation.
Universal Design is a good design. Larger font, ease of navigation, sensitivity to wayfinding, and the need to be helping matters.
Conclusion
The local community calls for the experience of Lucy in Disguise to be available 24/7 online to share what Austin has come to love. Lucy loves their people, from staff to the shopper, it’s an experience that can translate and enlighten anyone’s inner characters!