GILT goes Social!
What’s the best part about shopping? Dressing room conversations with your bff, right? So many memories!
So naturally, I was super excited to be a part of a project that was tasked with adding a social feature to the Gilt e-commerce app. This was also the first time we were working in a team and that was a great opportunity to see how others approached a problem, and learn from them.

The Beginning
As an online marketplace that specializes in aggregating luxury fashion and lifestyle products, Gilt wants to broaden its customer base through social engagement, as their current business model can’t keep pace with the growing industry.
Together with my team — Jen & Eliza, we set about creating a feature for Gilt that not only met the business needs but also the user needs. We created a project plan and time-boxed each of our activities. We tried our best to stick to the timeline but at times found it hard to do. A big learning early on was to be more efficient in time management.
From the brief we were pretty clear about Gilt’s business needs, but to make sure we were tackling the bull by the horn, we started doing research on the company and their competitors. The idea was to see what Gilt’s competition was doing differently and if there was an opportunity.

We discovered 4 possible areas of opportunity for Gilt based on what the competition is currently doing -
- Creation of wishlists
- Offering recommended items based on different variables like season, occasion, location etc.
- Allow barcode scanning to suggest similar items
- Creation of style profile
User Research
Our minds were already teeming with a million ideas, so before going any further we put our thoughts on an empathy map. The next thing to do was to find out what the users need. To recruit right users for our potential feature, we sent out a screener survey that would help us filter participants who met our core criteria — online shoppers who used phones to browse/shop and share. We received 41 responses out of which 11 participants qualified. We interviewed a total of 8 people.

We received some valuable insights from these user interviews. One of the biggest assumptions we had about online shoppers was that they like sharing and forming a community online, but we were surprised to learn that most people prefer their shopping experiences to be a private affair. We put down observations from user interviews on post it notes reshuffled them a few times till visible trends emerged.

After synthesizing the interview findings, we fleshed out 5 possible user requirement. This observation was further reinforced by the quotes that we heard from some of our users.

Gilt already provides excellent deals on luxury items and has curated personalized recommendations based on the users choice of brands. So the two possible problem area’s that we zeroed in on were —
- Need for validation when shopping online
- Need for wish lists or save for later lists
From our competitive studies it was clear that many of Gilts competitors have a wish list feature, however none of them have a clear solution for direct communication between users. Therefore addressing this issue can put Gilt in an advantageous position in the market.
Also from our comparative studies we knew that social brands like Instagram and Pinterest have beautifully integrated the direct communication between people within their apps.
Based on this data, we identified a unique opportunity that would help solve both, the users need and business needs.
Most people love the opinion of loved ones when shopping for clothes. While this experience is easily enjoyed when shopping with a friend at a physical store, we wanted to extend that experience to online shopping as well.
With this in mind, we arrived upon the problem statement -
The indecisive online shopper needs a way to interact socially while shopping so that they can corroborate and consult with someone they trust before making a purchase.
To understand the problem better we tried to pictorially depict the problem through this storyboard. It also helped us to understand the problem better and gave an insight into the type of user who might be using this feature.

From there, we created a persona that would portray possible Gilt shoppers in order to anticipate their wants and needs.

Ideation & Design Decisions
Now that the problem was defined, there were several ways to approach it. Jen, Eliza and I brainstormed to come up with features that could be a possible solution. We had to do a Feature Prioritization in order to focus on the most effective solution.

The most effective solution turned out to be a direct messaging feature between a user and their friends.
We did a quick user flow to see what journey the user will take through this new feature.

The next thing to do was draw some rough sketches and wireframes to see if the design made sense on the existing app.

With our paper prototypes and wireframes completed, we set up our own usability lab and conducted a series of User Tests. These are some of the takeaways from the tests -
- All 3 user test participants agreed that the interface was simple and easy to go through
- Since we wanted users to be able to access the validation of their friends directly and quickly, without having to go through the general settings on the sticky navigation, we redesigned the app to consist a bottom navigation bar with a messaging icon.
- In our first design, we had the ‘ask a friend’ and the ‘compare buttons right next to each other, but through user testing it was clear that people were getting confused here and it was also competing hierarchically with the ‘add to cart’ button.
In the final prototype we also added a bottom navigation bar, something that is a mobile standard but was missing from the original app

Click here to view our final prototype: https://projects.invisionapp.com/d/main#/console/11595259/244861409/preview
SO WHAT DID WE DO FOR GILT?

NEXT STEPS
- Further user testing to validate efficacy, ease of use and purpose of features
- Build out messaging capabilities to further the user-to-user engagement
- More ways to connect socially
- Addition of ‘Wishlists’
