Previously Owned By A Gay Man
Website
Project Overview: Previously Owned By A Gay Man takes advantage of the ever evolving consumers. It is a site where sellers can advertise their designer furniture that no longer goes with the new curtains and buyers can purchase fabulous pieces at a consignment price. They came to us for help on growing their customer base. Our growth analyst analyzed and advised on marketing strategies and the design team redesigned the landing page based on growth team's advise and usability testing.
The Challenge: The growth team conducted a CRO test on Previously Owned By a Gay Man's existing site and we learned that users were not conversing when they first opened the landing page. The product design team's challenge was to discover why.
My Role: I worked with my small design team to do usability testing and wireframing. I completed the UI transformation of the landing page.
Before
After
(See the bottom of the page for the full version of the landing page)
My Process
We started our redesign with growth's google analytic breakdown. The design team balanced these numbers with usability test insights to discover multiple pain points throughout the website. After figuring out the most urgent problems, we created wireframes to construct the structure of the sight and then I applied the UI to the frames. We collected feedback and iterated.
Persona
The Google Analytics showed that women were the main users and the highest converters. Previously Owned by a Gay Man's price points were often in the thousands so the clients had a more disposable income. We choose to create a persona who has a little more free time because the process of redesigning one's own home is delightful but also time consuming. Clients who don't have time but have a larger income would normally hire an interior designer.
Usability Tests
We preformed usability testing on both Previously Owned by a Gay Man and their competitor Chairish. We had 6 women test Previously Owned by a Gay Man and 6 women test Chairish. Here are our findings.
Design Workshop
The research told us what worked and didn't work. The next step was figuring out potential solutions. We conducted Crazy 8s and then sketched out a few wireframes in the workshop. We took our favorite ideas and blocked out wireframes in Sketch.
In the design workshop, we also worked on the information hierarchy. The most important point was to display the furniture. Slightly obvious but it was the key aspect that all of the users responded to. We wanted to differentiate ourselves from other consignment furniture sites so we highlighted our value prop, Previously Owned by a Gay Man's curator Geoffrey De Sousa. Other key pieces of information was promoting the seller's page and social proof.
Low Fidelity Wireframe
We used the crazy-8 ideas to create low-fi wireframes. We had a large variety but these are a great example of our thought process.
Diving Deeper into Navigation
Challenges
There was a lot of information that needed to go into the nav bar. Example: furniture categories, shopping cart, information about the company...etc.
The sell button had to be highlighted. Previously Owned by a Gay Man is a double sided market place and we had to be careful about balancing both sides. We needed the sellers to quickly identify where they needed to go.
The logo is large and detailed. We didn’t want it to get lost but we couldn’t have it as big as their original design.
Winner
The Process
We created a three tier navigation bar to accommodate the information.
We played with different ways of highlighting the sell page and ultimately decided that creating a button was the most eye-catching solution.
We decided to colorblock the tiers to make the furniture categories pop out.
We placed the logo on the left side to balance the sell button.
Results
We presented the designs and recommendations to Previously Owned by a Gay Man. They were able to implement some of the recommendations in their redesign but due to limited resources they were not able to make all of the changes. They do have a process and suggestions for future redesigns.
