Rue La La
Incremental improvements to browse and discovery
In 2019 Rue Gilt Groupe was struggling to convert their newest members on Rue La La and Gilt, especially on mobile web. The Product team had plenty of assumptions as to why this might be the case, and plenty of ideas for enhancements to the user experience large and small. But where was the best place to start? With resources stretched tight, were there small wins that could have a significant impact?
My role was to lead our research and design efforts. As a first step, I ran a series of user studies on mobile web to mimic a typical first time user experience, prove or disprove some of the team’s assumptions, and pinpoint usability issues that hindered first-time shoppers.
Product List Page before (left) and after (right).
We learned a lot from those initial tests, but one of the things that stood out was that new members struggled just to find their way around the site. As a result, I designed a number of improvements to wayfinding and navigation, and worked with the team to implement them within a short time.
Women’s section before (left) and after (right).
Subsequent user tests, pre-post analysis and AB testing demonstrated that the changes had a positive impact on engagement and conversion, not only for new members, but existing members as well.
However, not all our issues could be solved with a simple UI update. New and existing members alike had trouble finding the products they wanted. Many of these issues were compounded by data quality problems. Next the team decided to look inward at some of our internal tools for managing product data.
Internal tool for product category assignment to improve data quality.
Browsing Women’s Clothing by category before (left) and after (right) the introduction of our internal tool for assigning categories to products.
I worked with our design co-op to design and implement a new tool for making more accurate category assignments. This was adopted into the workflow, resulting in fewer errors, and a vastly improved browsing experience for members.
Looking forward, I proposed new ways of thinking about our product data. I helped the team visualize how that might be managed internally, and how it could be represented in the customer-facing ui.
Diagrams documenting the current internal workflow, and proposing how it could be modified with the goal of improving data quality.
Low fidelity concepts demonstrating how new data models could translate into an improved browsing experience for users.