How I designed a seamless user experience for a luxury fashion app

The Problem

With access to the biggest brands and stocks in designer luxury, Desilux negotiates deals with top luxury brands, offering members substantial discounts, often 50% to 90% below retail prices.

However, due to the exclusive approach, customer retention was low. Compared to current competitors and the rise in use of mobile retail apps, we knew that this was an important problem to solve. A failure to deliver a better solution posed a risk of losing our current customer base. Here's an overview of my role in leading the UX design process.

The Process

Using the double diamond model as a visual representation of the design process - my process started in the middle with a user flow and various ideas sketching.

I started off the design process with a basic user flow to help me understand the possible user navigation through the web app. Initially the user had to sign up in order to see the content, but this turned out to be discouraging so we eventually removed this step. The goal was to get users to sign up and to for the gold membership.

In this step I also did a brief analysis of the current competitors which helped me pin down the most common visual design elements and UI patterns.

Next step in finding the solution was to generate different designs based on our observations and the client's feedback. After we narrowed down the general direction, we started designing different variants for the landing page.

We ended up going for the third option although I wish we went for something more like the second. I think having too much content on a landing page can bore the user. The goal is to keep them engaged and have them sign up and shop, so I think having fewer sections with some editorial photography and maybe some products would do a better job.

Constraints & Trade-offs

I was presented with an idea of Flash Sale events with the purpose of keeping customers engaged. I designed a few versions, one of which was a main events page, displaying an current and upcoming event listing, where the user could choose to be notified in advance. However due to time constraints and technical complexity, we had to let go of the notification feature. We kept the multiple events feature that could be displayed as hero banners or within the product listing.