Helping the world's leading fashion shopping platform access an untapped market, by designing a new content & discovery platform from concept to production. Empowering their core market with a ground-up redesign of the platform's hallmark feature.
ShopStyle is the world’s leading fashion & lifestyle shopping platform, leveraging varied product offerings to attract and connect consumers, brands, retailers, & influencers.
For the consumer, ShopStyle is a fashion search engine built on the largest product database of its kind in the world. For brands and retailers, it offers exposure to platform users in exchange for referral fees. For fashion bloggers and influencers, it’s an all-in-one monetization platform for brand partnerships and product placements.
While ShopStyle’s search-centric experience excels for consumers with well-defined goals, it’s historically offered little value to those seeking discovery, ideas or inspiration. The market opportunity for discovery-oriented shopping is estimated at $8B, with 55% growth in associated google search traffic in the past 2 years.
ShopStyle commissioned me for a 3-month contract focused on designing new consumer-facing experiences to turn low-intent browsers into high-intent shoppers, serving as interim Director of Product Design for their consumer business.
With support from product & research, I led the design of a new system of consumer-facing, responsive web-based experiences from concept to implementation.
Deemed the “upper funnel,” this new environment for ShopStyle’s platform aims to capture low-intent shoppers from varied entry points, provide a content-focused, explorative browsing experience that adapts to consumer needs and contexts, and facilitate discovery and inspiration to help consumers define purchase intent.
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Business and organizational goals:
Engage low-intent shoppers with content-driven experiences designed for discovery and inspiration.
Create a modular design system that allows editorial teams to ship content at scale.
Provide context and pathways to retain shoppers whether they originate from SEO, SEM, or ShopStyle’s website.
Integrate and leverage ShopStyle’s “Collective” business (blogger/influencer platform), which was never effectively marketed nor provided visibility on the consumer platform.
A new, content-driven shopping platform facilitates discovery and inspiration via passive browsing.
Whether shopping for an event, a season or a vacation, consumers can filter content based on individual needs to turn motivation into actionable ideas.
A content design system provides a creative framework for ShopStyle editorial teams to publish at scale – with pre-formatted text blocks, theme blocks, curated product grids and tagged header components.
A redesigned, mobile-friendly “Shop the Look” component showcases blogger-generated outfit ideas with featured products. The updated design features blogger info, social media followings and a single featured product for a more focused experience and increased brand legitimacy.
The new content platform exceeded expectations in qualitative user studies and A/B testing, and was subsequently shipped to 100% of web traffic.
As part of my work on ShopStyle’s upper funnel experience, I was able to advocate and ship a complete redesign of the site’s search feature.
Search is ShopStyle’s core feature, serving as the primary mode of navigation for most site visitors. Yet aside from suggesting a few queries from a user’s history, the previous design did nothing to make life easier for the feature’s users.
Following the hypothesis that most platform users are trained to search (even if they’re not totally sure sure what they’re looking for), we wanted search to serve as a pathway for discovering ShopStyle’s new content platform.
I led an end-to-end redesign of search for responsive web, aiming to make lives easier for high- and low-intent users alike.
Before a query is typed, the new search feature guides low-intent users by suggesting trending editorial content and providing pathways to explore content based on a need or context. While typing, search suggestions are sorted into groups for products, content, and influencers on the ShopStyle Collective platform. I also shipped a visual redesign to improve usability.
The new search design increased conversion by 11% in A/B testing, and was successful in guiding users to the new content platform. It was subsequently shipped to all web traffic.