It had been over 7 years since EddieBauer.com had undergone a major website redesign. Over time, small incremental changes had lead to an outdated and disjointed website.
Managing the site and making updates was also a huge pain-point for Eddie Bauer. This project was a chance to start fresh.
Some of the key goals accomplished during this project were a simplified navigation, a framework for brand storytelling, improved mobile shopping, efficient checkout, visual search, improved filtering, and a robust buy online, pickup in-store feature.
Project Overview
MY ROLE
Requirements
Project Planning
Stakeholder Interviews
Competitive Research
Information Architecture
User Stories
User Flow Design
Template Wireframes
Prototyping & Testing
TEAM
UX Designer
UI Designer
Project Manager
Creative Director
DATE
2018 – 2019
Visual Design by Marissa Hui
Project Planning
Working backward from a fixed launch date, I created a project plan to ensure we stayed on schedule and budget.
Design deliverables prioritized by flows and anticipated development rollout. At this point in the project, the development partner had not been selected.
Discovery Phase
A quick, high‐intensity effort to understand our client’s vision, audit the existing site, review the competitor landscape, and begin research into user needs, behaviors, and pain‐points.
Stakeholder Priorities
1
Functionality first, design should follow best practices
2
Maintain or improve conversion rates
3
Rethink IA and site navigation
4
Redesign the mobile checkout experience
5
Balance brand storytelling with promotions
6
Design with sensitivity to IT constraints. Small changes can have a ripple effect.
To understand the brand better, the design team toured the flagship store and company archives.
Reviewing Call Center Reports
To better understand user needs, behaviors, and pain‐points I reviewed call center reports, Google Analytics, marketing campaigns, and demographic information.
Due to existing customer data, additional user research was not scoped.
Categories of help desk calls indicating user pain points
A/B Testing Findings
Reviewing split testing campaigns provided insights into user behaviors.
Site Audit
Evaluating the site helped identify usability issues, constraints and opportunities.
Competitive Research
Evaluating competitors against criteria uncovered during stakeholder interviews was helpful in generating ideas and understanding of “industry best practices”, one of the goals for the redesign.
Information Architecture
Site mapping and flows for improved site navigation and usability.
Rethinking Site Organization
The existing sitemap and information architecture was confusing and needed to be updated for the redesign.
Moderated tree testing uncovered many issues with the existing IA. Some were easily addressed, while issues that conflicted with internal client thinking were perceived as a risk to revenue. Split testing in production was viewed as the solution once the new site was up and running.
Hierarchy of Information
To build alignment and to balance brand storytelling with promotions, I mapped out how much emphasis each brand element should have across the entire purchase flow.
Designing with Flows
System flow diagrams were helpful for generating stakeholder and team align on requirements before wireframing and development began.
Sketch to Wireframe
My process involved sketching and white‐boarding concepts and flows and then translating these directly into medium‐fidelity wireframes.
Design Handoff, and Back
Once wires were approved, designs were handed off visual design to be updated with styles, fonts, colors, and prepared for development. On occasion, new requirements would emerge during UI that required additional UX work. When this would happen UI would pause so that the team could explore and identify a solution.
Visual designs by Marissa Hui
Honorable Mentions
This large and complicated project was not without frustration and challenges to overcome. Working as a team, having patience, and embracing these bumps as a natural part of the design process was important to keep in mind. Below are a few of these challenges.
Home
The home page needed to strike a balance of product category navigation, marketing promotions, and brand storytelling. I started by exploring concepts and then raised content fidelity before handing off to UI.
Search
To help users find what they’re looking for quicker, I designed a search that displayed suggested categories, visual products, and recent searches.
Category Display Page
The CDP needed to support groups of similar products, integrate marketing promotions and provide a method for guiding users to specific product categories.
Checkout Flow
After multiple iterations, the final checkout flow was a simplified, one-page checkout experience. Creating this flow was challenging due to shifting requirements. To align, I often sketched before moving into higher fidelity wires.
Buy Online, Pickup In-Store
This late addition to the scope affected the PDP, CDP, checkout flow, and account pages which all needed to be reworked. A challenging aspect of updating these templates was trying to fit new requirements into the existing design while preserving the work that had been done.
Accounts
One place where logged in users can access their rewards, saved items, recent orders, and update account preferences and personal information.
Personalization
For signed-in users, personalized alerts let users know when their order is ready for pickup or if there is an issue with their account. Additionally, based on order history and preferences, customers could be shown personalized promotions or new products in highly frequented shopping categories.
Storytelling Templates
Eddie Bauer wanted to tell stories and show customers an aspirational lifestyle they could experience through the brand. I designed several flexible content templates for everything from expeditions, to athlete profile pages where users could learn about gear recommendations from professionals.
Phased Launch
After 8 months, design handed off all approved mocks, flows, and UI for development. As of August 2019 the navigation, home, CDP, PDP have been launched. The checkout flow, accounts, and brand storytelling pages are still being built and rolled out.