Industry West
All deliverables and artwork created at Tomorrow / UX: Hagar Vander Design: Joy Ripart & Sarah Wong
Overview
Industry West is a premium furniture company that very carefully curates their growing and one of a kind catalog. They came to us in need of a site redesign and re-platforming. I was the lead UX designer on this redesign and aimed for a best in class experience that would better represent the brand.
Discovery
I lead all UX requirements gathering sessions where I was able to learn about user/business gaps we wanted to address. In preparation for the navigation redesign I also looked into the site’s analytics, performed a competitive analysis, and finally user testing to land on the right direction.
Design
My main area of focus was tackling an overwhelming IA structure as well as a lack of basic features and functionalities revolving search, filtering, and the browsing journey. In collaboration with the lead visual designer I also created more dynamic sections to better tell product stories.
Navigation
A few highlights:
The biggest UX task on my plate was streamlining the site's overly complex global navigation. I leveraged analytics to ensure our new navigational structure prioritizes categories users actually want to engage with and competitive analysis to study familiar naming conventions and patterns.
We went from having 15+ primary links to 9, which should (especially on mobile) give exposure to categories users could be missing entirely with such a lengthy primary nav.
I used chunking methods to simplify the secondary menu and make it more scannable. This involved grouping together small and related collections, which eliminates unnecessary links but also helps to “bulk up” nearly empty PLPs.
Finally, I performed one-click user tests comparing the site’s navigation with my proposed version. I was able to confirm my assumptions as my proposed version outperformed the site's existing navigation when it came to both accuracy and speed.
Design
A few UX highlights:
The client felt like their landing pages were a bit generic and wanted more dynamic reusable sections in their arsenal. In collaboration with Design, I worked on unique modules to better display collections, “shop the look,” site shopping benefits, and overall product story.
The PLP lacked basic functionality like multi-select filtering, exposed category filters for very large collections, hover states, and a proper badging system among other things. I incorporated these features to make browsing more straight-forward.
The design and development teams collaborated to create a flexible product card that would use a horizontal or vertical orientation depending on the type of product. This enabled us to present very vertical products like stools optimally and very horizontal products like sofas optimally.
On the PDP I introduced best practices like a sticky “add to bag,” product add-ons to increase basket size, as well as more descriptive size selectors that include important measurements.
I worked on a new feature allowing users to select fabric samples to be sent to them that was incorporated on the PDP and mini-bag.