Overview

Macy's has the latest fashion brands on women's and men's clothing, accessories, jewelry, beauty, shoes and home.

The challenge of this project is to design an engaging macy’s.com experience for customers to easily find and purchase items, and keep them coming back.

The target audiences are the fashion spenders. Her main drivers are:

• Getting true value for her money.

• A fashionable assortment and being inspired with outfitting possibilities.

• A large range of recognized, fashionable brands.

• A personalized, concierge service to help find what she wants and stay in the know

TL;DR

I came up with the idea of personalized fashion mailing subscription service. A quick preview of the first screen from the final product.

The Design Process

Research

Market Research

To start off the project, I researched and identify some of the major challenges fashion ecommerces are currently facing. Here are four of the biggest challenges.

• Saturated Market - The fashion commerce comes with various forms arranging from traditional box store, online commerce, international companies, local boutiques, and factories direct selling.

• High Product Return - Fit is a one of the biggest reason why people return fashion merchandize. Everyone is uniquely different in body shape and size, and often people do not know their exact measurements. Data from Allure System said that 45% of fashion ecommerce merchandize are returned because of fit problems.

• Low screen retention - The average attention spend for a web page is 6 second. Often, people need to see the product multiple time to develop an attachment.

• Low engagement -  Our body have six sense, and people crave an immersive experiences that creates a good story. Online shopping is only immersed in one sense -seeing. Traditional cloth shopping allows fashion spenders to try on the clothes, feel the fabric, show it their friends. Shopping online only allows consumers to see the product on a model that isn’t them.

Proto-personas

Next, I came up possible reason people use the Macy’s website. The few fashion shopping categories are: Business casual, Special Occasion, Athletic, Casual, kids, and Maternity. Based on the competitor research, and macy’s inventory. I am going to focus on the the Business Casual and Special Occasion personas.

Stated by the prompt, we will only be focusing on the female spenders.

Business Casual

Special Occasion

Synthesize

Solutions

Based on the findings regarding the e-commerce challenges and the user needs, I came a solution of Personalized mail subscription for fashion. Here is how it work in scope. First, users customize their personal profile and select a subscription choice, then the system match user needs with the fashion inventories, Finally a package would be shipped to either the store or people’s home.  

Base on this business model, I imagine here are the ways it would benefit the business:

• Predictable and continue revenue stream from subscribers

• Bulk sales by packaging various brand, style, and accessories

• Save time and money on logistic and shipping

• Plan ahead with collected data  

Aside from benefiting the business, the mail subscription creates positive experiences for the fashion spenders as well.

• Risk Free by not having to pay full price in advance

• A dream closet with various brand and styles

• Personalized concierge service with smart AI machine learning

• Try clothes at the comfort of their our home

In addition to the benefit for business and consumers, I have also identified Macy’s competitive advantage against other competitors (Amazon Wardrobe, LeTote, Stichfix, and Rent the Runway) in the space. The advantages are:

• Have physical stores - Drop off and pick up subscription at stores, connecting fashion spenders online and offline.

• Have loyal followers - Brand loyalty and recognition  

• Carries various brands - Flexibility on quality, style, and price

Ideation

Task Flow

I imagine how the flow looks like. My goal is to create an seamless and intuitive experience.

Features

Base on the research, here are the features I want to tackle in the mailing subscription service.

• Personalized Profile

  • My fit: height, body shape (waist, hip, bust), shoes, dress, pants sizes

  • My fashion style: color, brand, cuts, patterns,style

  • My price match: by brand, by style, by categories

  • My social: Pins from pinterest, Instagram saves, and other inspirations from external sites.

• Select a subscription service

  • Monthly, quarterly, weekly delivery

  • Retention

• Pre-selected styles

  • AI machine learning acts as a personalize concierge stylist

  • Customer can make additional revision on their order

• Shipping and delivering

  • Deliver to home or pick-up at a store

Sketches

Next, I had a sketch session jogging down down the interfaces. I want to visualize the hierarchy of information, and how each component complement each other.

Prototypes

Lo-Fi

In this version of Lo-Fi prototype, I focused on the customize my preference section of the “Fit” and “Style”.

Iterations

Body Shape

I took the prototype to do some validation test. Base on the feedback, some users were not comfortable to talk about their body size or know how to answer them. As a result, I replaced the exact measurements with friendly questions and descriptive images.

Live Image

To differential from other competitors, I came an idea of using live image to allow easier visualization. As the users input their data, the AI automatically generate photos based on the given information. When I take the prototype to validate the idea, all of the users loved the feature!

As I was creating the prototype UI, one of the challenge was the placement of the save live image button is not clear. Users were not sure what they are saving when click save. As the result, I move the save image next to the image and use the camera icon to indicate it captures image above.

One Page vs. Scrolling

I have created two version of the page. Version 1 is one page with all of the categorized information on it. For example, the fit feature would have body physique, height, dress, shoe, pants size. Version 2 is a clean page with one session at a time. Base on user validation, users would like to see one session at a time instead of bombard with multiple questions.

Hi-fi Prototype

With Macy’s design system, I created the first Hi-fi design mock-up of the first page. In this version, it contains the changes from the previous iterations.