2-week sprint for Selfridges Party brief | Project 2 of UXDi

Another few weeks go by, another great project to work on! I’m really proud to present this particular project as ideas have been rich and processes interesting to learn about, sometime feeling that taking two steps backwards enable me to take rethink things and make a leap forward.

Resources

1 brief | 2 weeks | 3 personas

Skills: Competitive analysis, Wireframes, Sketching, User research, Branding, Interview, User-flows, Concept mapping, Digitalisation, Keynote animations, layout, global navigation, site map, user journey, digital wireframes, clickable prototype

Tools: Keynote, Omnigraffle, inVision

Main objectives

• Understanding the user needs
• Research
• Development & Iteration
• Prototype of the microsite

My approach

Although many actors contribute to organising a successful party, whether it be by finding inspiration from Pinterest, getting supplies through John Lewis, Amazon or Easy, participants in a study, participants cited that it was becoming:

“more and more difficult to throw parties due to costs involved.”

Selfridges, leader of anything high-end, knew there had to be a better way. I thoroughly went through what the personas given by Selfridges had to say about how they liked to organise parties, and what they might be looking for to support them. I found there were many similarities but the common source of distention was that they all the personas wanted to be supported in different parts of their organising process and in different ways. I chose to focus on Willow as main persona for this as she emcompases the most loyal Selfridges customers and has the highest RFM score among the three, given that she organises parties to most often, with the highest budget. Willow is a young woman who loves throwing parties with the flatmates. She lives in London and is always interested in what’s new. With a new boyfriend on the scene she wants something to help her spend less time on organising, which can usually take her up to a few months.

One of the feature Willow needed was to something to help her split the costs between co-hosts, adding to this we wanted to add a party registry funtionality to give even more options to users when using the microsite. The user flow below details the different ways Willow can manage costs of the party: (1) between co-hosts, (2) pay by herself, (3) and by setting up the registry with added functionality to allow Willow to be very flexible about editing the amount of parties supplies.

Ultimately, it made it into the final design like this:

After understanding the user flows needed to build the microsite, I went on to sketch what the site could look like and how features would interact. The objective was to keep things as clean and pure as possible while integrating perfectly with Selfridges look and feel. One of the ideas I though of initially was to deliver a chatbot app for Selfridges Party, but ultimately decided against it as Willow, Will and Wanita all agreed on the fact that they wanted a desktop solution. Based on further interviews, design studio, card sorting and in-store visit here is the prototype presented:

https://invis.io/FW7V3EQ7E

The microsite brings a great variety of features to users like Willow to help her select themes according to her budget. She can save themes by clicking on the heart next to them:

Once having selected a few themes, Willow can edit her theme to fit her exact budget or tastes, if she wishes to add some quirky other items that might not have been in the theme she selected.

Willow is also able to track the status of the parties she created with whatever options she added while getting alerts on what needs to be completed.

The proposal allows users like Willow to remove the hassle of organising by focusing on just having fun with the best supplies possible thanks to Selfridges.