The world of architectural lighting is complex, cluttered, and overwhelming for architects and lighting designers. My client, The Lighting Group Network, wanted to ease the burden of fixture selection process by launching a capsule collection of versatile, durable and tasteful fixtures: Vanilla Lighting.
When the product line launched, the inquiries poured in, overwhelming the current sales staff with specific questions about the products. They needed a fast and efficient way to provide their architect and engineer customers with the critical information they to use Vanilla Fixtures for their projects.
As a Lighting Industry outsider, I needed to understand the needs of the stakeholders, the behaviors of the users, the advantages of their competitors, and most importantly, the company goals from the website.
To begin, I conducted hour long conversations with individual Stakeholders. I learned their take on topics from company overview, projected sales, aspirational branding, and specific sight needs. I was most curious about their 'need to have' list - I wanted to make sure our priorities on items to tackle aligned!
Through this process, we discovered the most important objectives:
- Relay key product information to potential clients
- Enhance existing brand guidelines
- Define Vanilla Brand and Product offering
- Reflect ease and simplicity of the products with the site experience had an urgent need- get "Cut Sheet" information to inquiring potential clients.
At the discovery phase of my project, I conducted a competitive analysis to better understand who the client's considered best in the market, who their users shopped with, and learn about industry information hierarchy and conventions, except...
There were no conventional Information Hierarchy among competitors. Because there is a wealth of information and variability per product, gaining insight to what information was considered most crucial to competitors and clients was a crucial first step. Since there seems to be no consensus, we developed our own hypothesis and decided to approach the design with an agile method, so that we could gather our own data and conduct our own research with users to uncover what information they find most crucial when makeing light fixture purchasing decisions, for each product.
Takeaway: Because many of the clients have existed in the space for years, there is a real opportunity to develop a distinct brand voice that conveys ease and simplicity in such a complicated market.
Takeaway: Education can be a point of entry and distinction. The current sites cater to experts who are existing clients (Architects, Engineers, General and Electric Contractors) who already know the foundation for lighting. Vanilla's opporunity can and should include educating a novice online shopper.
There are no shortage of details to provide for the expert. We also understood that a portion of Vanillas potential clients includes people who are less familiar with lighting design and all that goes into it. Part of the challenge was finding a balance of creating a skimmable product page for the experienced user, and a digestible overview for novice light fixture clients. How could we manage to do both at once?
Because we planned to launch the website with a lean MVP, I knew we wanted to start with a simple and minimalistic design. The client and I discussed most pressing urgent needs, and eventual goals. We defined the scope of the Phase 1 of the project to include 5 initial pages, plus a product template for the (ever growing) capsule collection. Thought we had many additional feature requests, we chose the keep the scope smaller and more feasible by prioritizing features based on importance to the main objective.
Once we launched the first phase of the site, I enabled some tracking and site performance metrics on the backend that would allow us to gauge the success of the first phase. We also planned to conduct additional user testing after the first phase was launched.
Part of the urgency in laucnhing the first version of the site (without first conducting user testing and revisions) was driven by the clients urgent need to get potential customers key product information. They needed a platform to provide "Cutsheets" for their architecture clients, without relying on the sales reps to email the sheets themselves. So, with their pressing pain point in mind, we launched first and tested later! Perhaps not the traditional UX process, but for this client, it was the right call.
Even after our site launch, we never stopped refining and enhancing the design. We are using various methods, like A/B Testing, Usability Tests, and performance optimization based on KPI tracking. We review these opportunities at our weekly meetings to review site performance, and make incremental optimizations.
A notable post-launch improvement is the hover animation in the product gallery. It showcases different shapes, colors, and trim styles for fixtures, allowing users to quickly gauge product suitability. This enhancement maximizes the use of our existing assets, providing users with a swift and comprehensive view of the product's versatility, a feature we identified as crucial through User Tests.
We maintain an agile approach for ongoing site updates and enhancements. Our upcoming optimizations involve revising the Product Page Layout, reducing carousels, implementing a longer scroll, adding product category filters, and hosting dynamic content to further illustrate product benefits. This continuous improvement ensures our site remains user-centric and effective.
We began Phase 2: Redesigning the MVP site, by conducting a series of User Interviews. We spoke with Lighting Experts, Novice Users, and other Lighting Decision makers (general contractors, home rennovators, interior decorators) to understand how the site was performing from their perspective.
These offered rich qualitative insights, helping us understand user perspectives, identify pain points, and discover valuable opportunities for improvement. The revelations from this quantitative inquiry were game-changing . Many assumptions and initial preferences outlined by stakeholders proved inaccurate, and we unlocked some paths for improved user experience, as well as significant business opportunities.
We also captured insights via Existing User Surveys to drill into some critical discoveries we uncovered in the Interview State. The surveys helped us quantify some of their sentiments, preferences, behaviors and provide a more in depth overview the degree to which these painpoints and opportunties were felt across the board.
Through the User Interviews and User Surveys, we unearthed many significant, actionable, and exciting insights from the various people we were able to connect with. A challenge was recruiting interviewees, since we didn’t have the budget or the buy in from Stakeholders to devout additional resources to reward interviewees. So, we were able to persuade former colleagues, friends, and the occasional charitable stranger to give us some honest criticisms of the site- resulting in 10 separate 45 minute User Interviews conducted over Zoom.
Another challenge faced at this stage was determining when and how to present the research findings. Since the team functions as a start up- time is a valuable asset! I needed to distill key insights, provide relevant context and demonstrate how to incorporate these findings into new layout all in the same meeting! The exercise was extremely educational for me as it served as a crucial reminder to always consider the audience (Stakeholders) and prioritize their needs.
My analysis focused on communicating measurable sentiments from User Surveys conducted in Qualtrics, illustrating pattern and sentiment grouping using Miro, and annotating existing Figma prototype designs to illustrate actionability of these findings.
"I think like, we're driven to, like, you know, photo based representation. But, I feel like its the best - more than to describe the feature more... "
All of the insights we discovered in the User Research phase meant we could immediately make some major cosmetic and strategic changes to the existing site. Because we had already done the work of developing a Style Guide and Branding Guidelines, I was able to tweak the existing
product designs factoring in the new emphasis on imagery, clarifying points of confusion, and revealing a more strategic informational hierarchy.
Looking back, we were eager to speed up the project, so we delayed doing usability testing and collecting feedback until later in the development process. While I still believe in the idea of quickly launching the MVP to meet the client's business goals, if I had the chance to do this project over, I would conduct usability testing earlier.
The client's product line grew unexpectedly fast, particularly due to shorter shipping times. This meant that we had to create new product pages faster than we could update their layout. When we eventually got the green light to invest in usability testing, we uncovered valuable insights that significantly improved sales, user-friendliness, and user comprehension. These changes were easy to implement and applied consistently across different user groups. So, we missed out on providing a better user experience for longer than necessary.
Incorporating usability tests and feedback earlier in the process not only would improve the final product's quality but also makes the entire project run more smoothly and efficiently. This experience is a valuable lesson for future UX projects, because I learned the importance of giving priority to user feedback throughout the development journey.
