Project Overview

The Team

The Approach

To guide our initial team meeting, we used the whiteboard challenge template to kickoff the project. Utilizing this template gave everyone a chance to voice their thoughts and do a preliminary brainstorming session together. It helped us gather and categorize potential ideas on FigJam. By the end of the meeting we aligned on the problem and specific goals we want to achieve for our client.

Identifying the problems and goals

Through the whiteboard model and a deeper dive into the problems our client is facing and their goals, we gained a clear direction for this project before splitting off into our own disciplines. We took away three key ideas to work with:

The Research

After understanding our client's target audience and aligning our project goals as a team, this gave us a clear direction for our user research. Starting with secondary research, we wanted to understand current consumer trends within the luxury retail space to get an overview of what is happening. We had two key findings that influenced our design decisions:

Secondary Research: Consumer Trends

Primary Research: What matters to shoppers of luxury brands?

Once we got a general understanding of what luxury shoppers are thinking and current consumer trends, we narrowed down our scope by conducting 3 user interviews with luxury brand shoppers between ages 25 - 35. Our goal was to gain an understanding of: (1) what drives customer loyalty, (2) what shoppers value about an in store experience that they can't typically get virtually.

Primary Research: What are current customers saying?

In collaboration with data scientists, we were also able to get an idea of what current customers of Canada Goose are saying in their reviews. This gave us an idea of what past customers care about, which we found was the quality of the materials used.

Key Takeaway: The Proto-Persona

To summarize our findings and identify who our user is, we created a proto-persona to visualize who we are creating for.

The Solution

Once we had a better understanding of who our user is and what they are looking for, we went back to our whiteboard challenge template to incorporate ideas that align with the data we collected and synthesized. We created a user flow that aligns with the digital marketing campaign our teammate was working on. This flow leads the user straight to a unique virtual shopping experience that include the following three features:

Feature 1: Tailored Shopping experience the moment they enter the site

For luxury shoppers, having a tailored and unique experience matters especially with the higher end price point. The idea of this user flow is to replicate an in-person shopping experience where an associate would greet you and help find what you're looking for. This also helps the user narrow down their search and have less products to browse through to prevent choice overload.

Feature 2: Virtual try-on using Augmented Reality

A big pain point of online shopping is not being able to see and style the product you're purchasing, especially when these products are a higher price point. Incorporating augmented reality into their experience allows the customers to get an idea of how it might look and reassure their purchase decision. The trend of utilizing AR/VR and mixed reality technologies are also on the rise and will be an integral part of the customer experience

Feature 3: Assigned personal style assistant to each shopper

From our research, we know that a positive customer experience is what drives brand loyalty and shoppers like going in store to get that customer service and interaction. This feature would allow users to always have access to that same service when needed and build strong relationships between associate and customer. Assigning them a "personal style assistant" can make the shopper feel special and want to go back because they can talk to the same person that helped them before, ultimately building brand loyalty.