iLove: rethinking the online fashion retail experience

Published by SprintMaster.co on behalf of the sprint master Camila Santos

Redesigning the entire online of shopping experience and browsing for fashion inspiration thorough deeply understanding the customer’s needs and wants

Mari Ribeiro was a pioneer in the Brazilian e-commerce scene. Tired of searching the internet for the “perfect black dress” or “the ultimate red lipstick”, she came up with a very disruptive idea: what if you could find everything you needed in terms of fashion, beauty, and home décor in just one place? What if this one place wasn’t a store, but a window to all the amazing stores that already existed and were so hard to keep track of? That’s how iLove E-Commerce was born in the early 2000’s. The business flourished, and now it encompasses more than 100,000 of the most loved brands and shops of the world, attracting a legion of women to its pages every day

The challenges of doing it all

With growth came the challenge of fitting everything from fashion looks and beauty tips to home décor ideas into one simple, yet gorgeous platform. The site was great and the traffic was good, but Mari and her team knew they could do better. They aspired to become the first place a girl would go to for inspiration as well as buying the latest trends.

Our challenge was to comprehend the different users the platform has and redesign the online search and navigation experience so that no matter what you were looking for, you would find it fast while enjoying yourself in the process.

A matter of minimalism

During the initial interactions with the platform and its users, we discovered a hard truth: the users loved the site but didn’t understand it.

To further understand this matter, our team recruited all sorts of users based on their fashion profiles, from brand lovers to everyday girls, as well as different online shopping profiles. To gather and work with so many different profiles was one of the most fun and challenging endeavors of this project, since the platform must serve all users.

During the interviews and tests we found that although captivating and unique, the platform wasn’t truly helping the users as it was expected. We identified the main problems with the platform for all the different profiles and developed a co-creation session where the users, design team, and clients were given the task to create the most wonderful online shopping experience ever. The results couldn’t have been better.

Focusing on what matters most

Throughout the process, we discovered that simplification was the way to improve the user experience. We separated different features into sessions, making it much more clear to the user what they could do on each section of the site.

The home page and search engines received the most improvements. Where you could once find sessions for fashion, home décor, beauty products and children’s gear all in one place, now you will find only one subject at a time. This will make it easier and more enjoyable for the user to navigate.

In the end, we prioritized all the solutions created with Mari and her team, delivering a “to-do list” that was organized and in line with time and budget constraints. By the end of that week, many of the solutions were already successfully implemented. Mari took on the habit of always having some of the guest users test the implementations, making iLove’s updates much faster and assertive.

I truly loved this sprint! Every encounter was so insightful that we were already implementing some of the ideas before it was even over.

Mariana Ribeiro, founder & CEO of iLove

Insights

• In an online business is normal to have multiple sets of users (ex: fashion taste vs online shopping habits).
• Sometimes less is more can lead to a better user experience. Try focusing on the essence of your service. What is that one thing that you are trying to do/help customers do?
• Learning to listen to your users is the one thing all business owners should learn how to do and practice constantly. Much can be learned just from watching someone perform a task on your platform.