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Betabrand
UX Design.

Betabrand is an online clothing community based in San Francisco, California. They design, manufacture, and release new products in small batches frequently (Cordarounds, Executive Hoodies, Bike to Work Pants, Disco Hoodies, Sons of Britches, Sock Insurance, etc) Unlike typical e-commerce retailers, Betabrand also offers a highly-curated inventory of fan designed and crowd funded clothing.

Betabrand responsive e-commerce platform has been growing very fast, adding new collections and products almost every week. Through the years, the web site structure became quite rich, marking it challenging at times for the user to navigate the collections and find new products, usually advertised offline. Recent user testing highlighted the need to enhance product findability, and to improve the navigation through different collections and new items on mobile devices.

The redesign project started with a workshop with Betabrand, which helped to identify the business needs and understand the evolving branding strategy of the company. It became evident that the online branding strategy wasn’t fully reflecting the freshness of Betabrand and its collections, and it didn’t highlighted enough the crowd funding aspect which was the main differentiator for the design community.

The Research phase involved an audit of the current e-commerce structure and content, followed by a card sorting exercise which involved 10 Betabrand customers, with the objective to identify how the site navigation and content could be improved without loosing the structure of the clothing collection.

The result of the exercise led to the design decision of reorganising the collection by gender and simplifying the navigation to keep it accessible from mobile devices.

The new structure and the shallower navigation was supported by the enhanced search tool with autosuggest that helps power users to get to the product they want faster and in just few clicks.

We identified three types of users:

1.

The focused user who usually knows what to buy because he saw the product through off line advertising or in Betabrand shops

2.

The browser user, who doesn’t know all the Betabrand offering and wants to browse efficiently, buying multiple items or entire suggested outfits

3.

The Betabrand lover who goes on the e-commerce website to upload one of his designs and go through the crowd funding selection.

After having identified three different type of users, the initial design phase was focused on idea generation and sketching, in order to develop the new site structure, the flows and the wireframes at the same time, following the energy of the design thinking. The final output was a paper prototype, which was presented to Betabrand and tested with 5 users. The second phase of the project was focused on wire framing and digital prototyping.