Pierre Frey - Website redesign
About the project
Pierre Frey is a pioneer in creating, editing, and manufacturing custom-made furnishing and luxury interior fabrics. The brand's collections mix materials and motifs that are united in harmonious colors and the brand are much appreciated for its boldness and high standards. As part of the development of the Maison Pierre Frey, the brand chose DISKO agency for the complete redesign and relaunch of their existing platform. The brand wanted to enhance the brand’s know-how and expertise to offer a global and premium brand experience. The aim of this reshape was to revisit the entire platform, inspire professionals and contribute to their creative process. Below, I'll explain the general process I advocated and show some of the features I designed. Some information is confidential and cannot be displayed.
Contribution : UX Designer
I was brought on board to work closely with strategists and the project manager on research, structure, design, and implementation. My key responsibilities were to :
- Prepare and participate in research sessions
- Structure the process with the Lead UX designer and advocate it towards the final delivery
- Prepare and conduct co-creation workshops + design activities with stakeholders
- Responsible of crafting all UX assets, wireframes & prototype
- Plan and facilitate review and test sessions
The problem
The platform allows leading decorators, interior designers and architecture studios to explore fabrics, furniture, and other equipment and contact the company or find a dealer. However, the website wasn’t responding to their needs of discovering, saving new products and getting specific information resulting in confusion during product research and selection. Their collaborators were struggling to use the platform due, in part, to ineffective methods of classification and visualization. Obviously, they were suffering from an outdated look&feel and global EXP.
Design challenge
User research
To develop a better understanding of the current situation—and to avoid any biased judgment, we wanted to meet and discuss with all stakeholders about their experiences and challenges with the current system. It was important at this step to build a solid relationship with all individuals so they could share their thoughts, passions, daily tasks and constraints. In collaboration with the consulting team, I prepared and conducted several interviews with experts as well as intercept survey in-showroom to immerse ourselves in Pierre Frey’s universe and ask users about their experience. We also wanted to analyze all different stages of the sales process and identify potential entry points for a digital product.
Thanks to the amount of knowledge extracted, we were able to raise assumptions and prepare the next interviews. This time, by meeting customers and collaborators (interior architects, project manager, interior designers and private client), I prepared questions and user scenarios so we could understand how the previous website was used, for what and identify pain points. Through this exercise, we were able to synthesize a number of interesting data to determine the main concerns, as follows.
The solution
The new platform was designed to enable customers to easily discover, select products, save and share their interior design projects. The platform would enhance professional's creative process and improves communication between the brand and customers.
- The mood board tool helps customers create, manage and share their customized furnishing project by saving product datas into their account.
- The website enables professional customers to easily order product samples online from their projects.
- The platform allows preparing and scheduling on-site appointments with experts so the customer can get tailored advices and follow ups in showrooms.
Design and Test
As soon as we validated the problem, identified pain points and opportunities, we were ready to pencil out and diverge on different solutions so we could test them. I planned and conducted—alongside with the project manager, co-creation workshops with the relevant participants. I prepared and facilitated each sessions using various exercises (card sorting, lightning demo, simple storyboard, crazy 8's) so we could validate our low-fi mockups. Later on, I would design hi-fi prototype in order to review, test and polish our concepts with experts and users. As we wanted the platform to be considered as an inexhaustible source of inspiration, I choose to declutter and clean the interface to enhance the hard work of the content production done by the brand.
The objective in organizing institutional content was to create emotion and convey the brand’s heritage values by highlighting notable project content. The tools used by the experts in showrooms deeply inspired me and my goals was to relay this experience through the product.
1. User journey & sitemap
Looking at the data collected during interviews, it was clear that most of the users were having a hard time finding specific products and even bookmark the ones they found due to the user journey and usability issues.
While facilitating workshops, we started to ideate possible site structures and features that need be included in the site. We built a System Requirement Chart As and prioritized each level of importance to help us identify which features are key to have. Once we completed a set of co-creation exercises, we validated navigation principles and different scenarios. We were then able to start working on the interface itself which allowed me to lead the design of each template.
2. Navigation menu
Before starting crafting the interface, I was struck by the number of categories used both in the menu and product filters. It was crucial to work on hierarchical taxonomy, gather and redefine categories with overcomplicated terms used into more simple ones. To achieve this, we’ve gathered data from multiple sources (competitive research, card sorting, content inventory, and interviews) in order to clarify this task.
3. Search engine
While conducting our user testing, I discovered that both experts and customers would always want to go straight for the search engine to navigate where they wanted to go. During workshops, we found out ways to simplify and make the program straightforward. The chosen solution we would implement would allow Pierre Frey analyzing, weighting content/product, adding tag and testing suggestions depending on user researches.
4. Mood board tool
The first objective of our work remains to enhance the creative process and help project realization by inspiring professionals. I conducted contextual interviews with professionals to fully understand how they interact daily and cooperate with Pierre Frey. It was pertinent to understand their full working process so Pierre Frey can facilitate their collaborators’ work.
To avoid overloaded screens and reduce cognitive load, we decided to separate the steps to be completed. This would allow us to temporarily unclog the screens so that the user can focus on the task to be completed. I assessed, test and polished three design solutions and decided to use a step-by-step solution which was the most relevant one regarding the outcome during the test and review sessions. The overlay modal allows users to have quick access to this tool and switch to another page when needed.
- Simplicity: Help people build, save and share (mail + public link) their projects.
- Contribution: The user would also have the ability to extract all product data to speed up the creation of their project presentation.
- Request: Giving the user the possibility to add a product to their basket or access to the single page through the mood board tool.
5. Product list & single page
Within the product list page, we had to provide specific ways to get to the product that people seek. Looking at the main use-cases, we implemented tailored filters and other properties such as brand sorting, card view, popularity and news to facilitate the discovery. We also had to take into consideration the different ways a user would get to this page, so the filters may differ from one category to another. I was also inspired by the physical product specifications in the showroom, I wanted to recreate this experience on product roll over and include available Colors. Regarding the product single page, I rated with users and experts on a scale from 0 to 5 what are their biggest concerns so they can :
- Visualize, configure product while showing it in a wider scene
- Find technical information, specifications, and benefits (incl. calculator and stock availability).
- Read Infos from the Artist and Pierre Frey on the specific product or collection.
- Discover more similar products and other ones within the same collection.
- Facilitate contact with the brand.
