Case Study: Designing the online jewelry store Joias de Luz
“Light Jewels”, in loose translation, is an online showcase that presents the creations of Beca Peonnia, a talented Brazilian jewelry artist who crafts unique talismans and fine jewelry. This case study describes the e-commerce creation, detailing its design thinking process and tools.
Here you can READ about this project.
Rebeca (the real name of Beca) is a dear friend from Art School. A friendship that surpasses 20 years. From the Figure Drawing classes in college, I remember watching Rebeca’s drawing method, intrigued: “Who starts a drawing from the model’s foot? And ends up with a VERY good result?!”.
At some point of her artistic journey, Rebeca moved towards the direction of jewelry, always creating something unique and special.
Background
The Online Jewelry Store Joias de Luz is a project developed with collaboration of Guilherme Montiel, during the UX/UI Design Bootcamp (Ironhack Sao Paulo).
The project followed the process and tools of Design Thinking, proceeding with (I) Identifying the Problem, (II) User Research, (III) Interaction Design & Information Architecture, (IV) Visual Design.
At the end of five weeks, we presented to the class, the creation process and the interactive high-fidelity prototype made in Figma.
Part I: Identifying the Problem
Stakeholder Interview
One of the most remarkable aspects of Rebeca’s work is her jewelry vision. According to her, a jewel is neither something solely to adorn nor is an object for ostentation. Rescuing the ancestral meaning of the ancient art of jewelry, the designer sees her creations as talismans.
“The talisman is a living presence of feelings, states of mind, memorable and unforgettable experiences which inspire a certain energy. All talismans are crafted with a purpose and whoever carries this meaningful object is supplied with the intention that motivated its creation.”
Beca Peonnia
Nowadays, Beca is prioritizing personalized jewelry that is produced on demand by carefully listening to her customers’ needs. In an interview, a client confided that her first contact with Rebeca was when she was looking for an emerald to get courage from the gemstone. By chatting with Rebeca, she decided to order a small pendant which she is carrying everyday under her PPE (Personal Protective Equipment). The client was a nurse.
Rebeca also has a free jewelry creation and most of these pieces are designed from rare gemstones that she found by searching for unusual materials around the world. Signing a prolific and assorted creations, she divides her work into three brands:
Desk Research
The state of current jewelry market, based on Project findings:
- Necessity to niche, in order to focus the marketing and sales strategies
- Online jewelry sales have grown due pandemic
- Digital experience about jewelry has to be pleasant and convey a sense of security, desirability and emotion
- Marketing budget is important to get the necessary attention of the audience
With these data, we have a good foundation for the next step.
Business Analysis
After an hour of interviews with Rebeca, Guilherme and I gathered a large amount of updated information. Doing business analysis through a SWOT Analysis followed by a LEAN UX CANVAS, we could identify the problem and what we had to learn.
Project question:
How to expand Rebeca’s audience through her inclusion to the digital business?
How Might We (HMW)
With this framework, we have sketched our strategy.
Part II: User Research
Qualitative Research
The interview conducted with three of Rebeca’s clients was structured to reach the following goals:
- Understand client’s profile and daily routine
- Delineate clients’ relation with their jewels, asking about their purchase decisions and listening to their personal testimonials related to their jewels (we have heard beautiful stories in this part…)
- Detect perceptions, strengths and weaknesses of the business, asking clients the details about their experience designing a personalized jewel with Rebeca
The interviews unveiled a rich and solid data about her niche and audience profile. By reviewing those transcriptions, we could remake a niched persona to guide our next actions.
Persona
Note The persona was created intentionally without a profession in order to avoid stereotypes. Rebeca said that she has clients from different backgrounds and the major affinity among all of them was a genuine interest for self-knowledge and self-development.
Empathy Map
By this scheme, we could identify customers’ behaviors and attitudes and recognize their PAINS and GAIN, getting a better understanding of what customers need to do and decide to order a personalized jewel.
User Journey Map
Based on the empathy map and interviews, we created a user journey map to recognize the feelings clients go through as a client order a personalized jewel with Rebeca.
Although predictable, it was surprising to detect that the client’s satisfaction rose along the journey. It was clear that our challenge was translating that positive experience to the digital world, in which the customer does not have direct contact with Rebeca’s careful attention and kindness.
Part III: Interaction Design & Information Architecture
Site Map and Minimum Viable Product (MVP = ★)
User Flow
Happy path built from Beth perspective. She wants to buy a talisman, choosing by gem stone energy.
Part IV: Visual Design
Brand Sprint
The most prominent necessity of our project that moment was to have a strong concept for Joias Luz as an online jewelry store and to define a branding with a visual identity that matches Rebeca’s vision and mission to influence the clients and make the notion of talisman resonate in them.
At one point, we felt blocked as we tried to define Joias de Luz jewelry branding. During a mentoring session with our teacher, he suggested running a Brand Sprint. Eureka!
After an intensive question and answer dynamic with Rebeca, we could understand her business better and clarify our doubts:
- The company’s GOAL is to provide a life experience to customers. It is an experience lived during a memorable personalized service (from the first contact to the delivery) and connected with the relation between customer and his talisman energy. These experiences were the business’ “secret sauce”.
- The company’s COMPETITORS weren’t other jewelry companies, but products that generate life experiences. Travel is one example.
And finally: The Branding!
Mission: See the world and people with love, in an authentic,
individual and profound manner.Beca Peonnia
Benchmark Analysis
We have gathered a large range of Benchmarks for this project. In order to filter and select proper references for our project we study the luxury products category of Baymard Institute e-commerces analyses. By understanding their analysis method and observing our select benchmarks we noticed the following key points:
- Elegance and beauty are mandatory qualities for photos and visual elements.
- Photos of models wearing jewelry were necessary for a more realistic notion of the products.
- Feelings of simplicity, freshness and a limited color palette are more appealing. The jewels and the models should look bright on the screen.
- Text with voice and tone that reflects the brand’s personality and that creates a strong storytelling sense is needed
We also frequently visited during prototyping the websites of Tiffany, the jewelry section of Louis Vuitton and the Brazilian brand, Outer Shoes.
Mood Board
UX Writing
The writing style, precisely, the voice and tone for Joias de Luz were essential to the e-commerce content. It required special attention and study of UX Writing, since this was only briefly covered during our bootcamp. Two articles in Portuguese helped us to establish the voice and tone of the jewelry brand:
Thinking on user emotional states during his experience with the online jewelry store:
Style Guide
Prototypes
Usability Test
To find the answers for the following questions we conducted users tests with 2 individuals:
- How quickly are users able to grasp the categorization of jewels by energy types and would this lead them to purchase a product?
- How easy is it for users to use the Wishlist feature?
- What feelings are evoked by the website’s visual and textual content?
👍 We identified purchasing flow starting from energy types was easy to follow for the users and that they found it appealing.
👍 Wishlist feature was used without difficulties.
👍 E-commerce content was praised. One user commented that some visual elements of the product page could be “more flashy”.
Next Steps
- Improve the visual elements creating more variations between the screens
- Complete the section of the website that is for selling services in addition to jewelry items.
- Conduct more user tests
Afterword
Rebeca has watched our presentation and commented that we have perfectly understood her business and what she wanted to express with her art. She also said how surprised she was with all the process involved in the creation of a website.
Reviewing our process while writing this case study, I was able to clearly see how the design thinking process and tools helped unravel the problems that arose throughout the project, providing an effective framework for decision making and reasoning.
I’m happy and proud about my progress in learning UX/UI Design. The 24-weeks bootcamp was intense. On top of the bootcamp’s challenging schedule to cover large amounts of study content, and projects. Keeping up with my current job routine was another challenge. All this was aggravated even more due to the 12 hours time difference between Sao Paulo and Tokyo!
Finally, I would like to conclude this case study thanking my teammates Guilherme, Julia and Urial for their important contribution to this project and Rebeca for all her support.
In addiction, special thanks to our senseis Emerson Niide and Diego Garcia for their attentive mentoring during Bootcamp and all Ironhack Sao Paulo classmates for all the insightful feedback. It was a pleasure to be a part of this special and motivated group!
