Lulu and Georgia

Background

An e-commerce brand, designed for interior designers and enthusiasts.

Lulu and Georgia (LG) is a direct-to-consumer home furniture brand looking to redesign its web experience and optimize for users shopping for furniture online. While LG focused on scaling its business to meet accelerated demand during the pandemic, the company's existing user experience and visual design have caused problems for customers post-migrating to Shopify which has affected conversion metrics. I joined the company in 2021 and was tasked to lead a full redesign and visual refresh of the company's existing e-commerce experience in an effort to address solve underlying user problems and support growth of important conversion metrics.

Web redesign highlights:

Navigation, PDP, Collection, Cart, Home

User Research

Shopping for furniture contradicts current device trends

Home decor shopping is typically a research intensive activity for users when compared to other products. The combination of: high costs, desired aesthetic, a high-volume of competitors and the 2020-2021 pandemic created an environment where users spent the majority of their time browsing online from home, researching for their desired product across multiple competitors and doing it all on their desktop computer. To better understand current demographics and user stories - we surveyed 2500+ existing customers, interviewed 6 participants and conducted multiple rounds of current site usability tests.

Insights gathered:

Users prefer familiar design patterns for navigation when shopping for home decor
Clear product description, details and dimensions are high priority for decision-making
Users prefer desktop when making expensive home decor purchases
Users highly value convenience when shopping online for home decor
Users frustrated most by a lack of visual context regarding color, fabric and texture

"What I like about shopping online for furniture is convenience, time-saving and being able to look at a broader selection then what is in store - including filtering my search and comparing prices."

Susan

Participant

LG user, Marketing

Ana

Participant

LG user, Sales

“It bothers me that I have to scroll down all these photos to add to my cart - that’s the first thing that makes this page frustrating.”

Customer Goals

Identifying Lulu and Georgia's user

Aside from market research data, Lulu and Georgia had never really understood who their persona for LG.com was. To help focus our design and development efforts we leveraged insights from user research to identify who the primary user was for luluandgeorgia.com that needed to be hyper-relevant throughout our redesign process.

LG.com Customer (Convenient Clara)

Demographics

Name: Clara
Age: 38
Occupation: Account Executive
Family: Partner + Children
HHI: $100k - $150k

needs and goals

Wants clear and robust product details and description on PDP
Prefers an experience that's simple, clean and easy to navigate
Wants as close to the in-person experience as possible.

behaviors and frustrations

Doesn't have time to shop in-person, she's a hard worker and dedicated parent
Shops for expensive products exclusively on Desktop
Always browses across multiple competitor sites when shopping for home decor
Hates the process of having to return furniture when shopping online
Frustrated when product details online don't match with in-person experience

Information Architecture

Developing dynamic frameworks and logical taxonomy

Current state information architecture was functional, but navigation UI created moments of high-friction for users due to lack of grouping under subcategories and tertiary categories. The LG merchandising team also needed better flexibility to add and remove collection pages seasonally without confusing users. Insights from UX audit, card sorting exercises and tree testing included:

Insights gathered:

Average score of 93% accuracy for category organization and taxonomy from card-sorting
Low-accuracy scores stemmed from confusion with tertiary category taxonomy
Lack of discoverability in mega-navigation UI created confusion for users when browsing for niche categories
Existing mega-navigation layout lacked organization + violated grouping heuristics

Problem Set

Key areas of focus

After completing a full site audit, coupled with conversations across the LG brand, marketing and engineering teams, we found a few key areas of focus to help drive design decisions moving forward.

Simple and easy to absorb product information and details

Users browsing site-wide needed a simple way to absorb key product information quickly while shopping. Although the UI for product details on PDP is a common design pattern, keeping information hidden in accordions created scenarios where users kept missing key product details which later future problems for support.

Leverage high-impact imagery sitewide to map in-person experience online

Whether on PDP or Home, it was crucial for us to focus on leveraging high-impact product imagery site-wide to help map the experience online as close to the in-person shopping experience as possible. On PDP for example, it was crucial for us to move away from the existing experience which required users to scroll to view up to 12+ product images. We focused on creating a familiar image selector experience that allowed for high-volume image browsing while still being simple and intuitive to use.

Foster both navigability and discoverability sitewide

‍A common problem faced by users shopping in this category is getting to where they need to go - quickly. Since LG has a vast catalog, we knew improving navigability across key pages in the user journey was critical to decreasing friction and improving metrics. Information architecture needed to be logical + concise and the filtering experience on collection pages needed to be accessible + easy to use.

Approach

Prioritizing key user struggles

The biggest challenge to the engineering and product teams going into this project was scope, so we had to be intentional with how and where we focused our time. We agreed the priority would be to focus on identifiable 'low-hanging fruit' and most importantly - key e-commerce features that would address underlying user problems in the shopping experience.

PDP

Mapping the in-person experience online

Keeping in mind that users wanted as close to an 'in-person' experience as possible online, another challenge we had was how to improve the main image experience on PDP. Over 90% of users we interviewed were frustrated with the existing image scroll experience which impeded their ability to quickly add to cart, and created friction for users when trying to access sections below the fold. We built a dynamic image selector and sticky buy section which allowed for users to quickly browse thru product images easily without compromising the primary CTA.

One aspect of the PDP that was particularly difficult to simplify was product descriptions. This information is critical to customers when shopping for home decor and users often overlook this information when details are hidden in collapsed accordions. I designed an expanded product description that users could scan as they scrolled down page and an accompanying sticky buy section to ensure frictionless add to cart.

Collection Page

Simple solutions for navigability

Users had difficulty navigating LG's collection pages due to a lack of affordances for subcategories beneath large primary categories such as furniture and rugs. To improve navigability, we designed a prioritized subcategory section with category cards above the product catalog, as well as a secondary CTA beneath a fixed number of rows, allowing users to expand and see more products. Existing data pointed us in this direction.

Cart

Well-timed feedback and value

Auditing the existing mini-cart experience exposed a number of challenges including: delayed feedback to the user on add to cart, unconventional UI and missed upsell opportunities. We designed a new cart drawer that clear visual signifiers to improve feedback, a space for relevant upsell opportunities to increase AOV% without users having to context switch and better transparency around cart value earlier in the funnel.

Home

Prioritizing navigability and story-telling

The team was pragmatic with regards to what we wanted to focus on since this is the brands storefront and page that receives the highest amount of traffic. Beyond unconventional UI issues, underlying problems faced by users we spoke with included: frustration around understanding the catalog of products the company sells and missing links to new products. Marketing and merchandising team also pointed out missed opportunities with regards to promoting important collections, individual SKUs, missed opportunities to communicate value and overall story-telling on Home. We architected a new Home page layout that helps improve navigability for users, highlights new products and creates spaces to promote brand-forward collections to improve story-telling.

Brand and style guide

Elevated and accessible

Refreshing the Lulu and Georgia brand was a challenge since there was little to work off of. I collaborated heavily with both the marketing, brand teams and founder throughout the process. The brand had to instill trust and both an elevated + product-driven vibe. After a variety of iterations, we landed on a style that would be both design-forward and accessible for users.

Validating Solution

80% increase to conversion rate

I found a new appreciation for cross-collaboration working with teams across Marketing, Brand, Merchandising in order to research, build and deploy this redesign over the course of year. Special care was also taken to help validate the iterations we made to LG.com, specifically AB testing multiple iterations over the course of 2 consecutive quarters. Despite a challenging e-commerce environment in the summer of 2022, we saw an 80% increase to conversion rate within 3 months of implementing the first stages of redesign.