Background

We had just went through a rebrand, where we updated the product and improved a lot of the UX/UI which was dated and clunky.

Beyond updating the brand elements and UI throughout, I focused on making the navigation more accessible and user-friendly, created more engaging ways for users to shop collections, and made our PDPs more shoppable with related items and seller reviews.

Challenge

We saw a small lift in revenue with the product update, but while the design as whole was more user-friendly and cohesive, it wasn’t very personalized which we saw as a huge opportunity for our particular audience.

Online consignment is a unique e-commerce experience because there is typically only one of each item available. Because of this, our users would use filters for about 80% of visits. Beyond size, we researched what other preferences were important to our customers and found out that brand was equally as important–especially when it came to handbags.

Test and Learn Approach

We wanted to run a quick experiment to see what the potential lift in revenue could be if we automatically filtered products by the customer’s size and brand preferences. We ran the experiment on our web platform which was much quicker to implement.

We added a step for new users that asked them to set their sizes and select their favorite brands. When they went to browse products, those filters were automatically set and displayed only the most relevant products to them.

We ran the experiment for 10 days to get to statistical significance. We were shocked to see a 40% lift in revenue for new users. Additionally, the average time between sign up and first purchase went from 1 week to 3 days.

These learnings gave us confidence to put our efforts into designing out the full experience for our iOS app.

Design Process

This new feature focused on mostly updates to our onboarding flow and our filters. I started mapping out the happy path of this new flow where users would set their preferences after signing up. I also had to think about where it made sense in the product for existing users to do this and also how to message them about the new feature.

I discovered that making all of our brands available to follow in the onboarding flow would be too overwhelming and we also needed ways throughout the shopping experience for the user to follow brands that they like. I designed some additional functionality to follow a brand in all the main places brands are featured throughout the app.

After setting preferences, the shopping experience was personalized with the newest products in the sizes and brands applied. I provided a button for existing users (or users that decided to skip this) to easily access their preference set up at any time.

Within the filtering menus, the user’s preferred sizes or brands could be toggled on/off individually or as a set. For instance, I might really care about brands for handbags and shoes, but for not tops and jackets.

And lastly, the concept of following preferred brands was added to the Brand pages. Users would also receive notifications when their favorite brands had new items to shop or price drops.