Gilt Live

Imagine a new immersive shopping experience

How do you feel when you find that amazing deal?

Summary

Goal: Re-energize the core user base

My role: Senior UX Architect

• Generate ideas
• Lead offsite
• Prioritize
• Sketch
• Synthesize feedback
• Iterate and present
• Collaborate throughout implementation

Target: Shoppers lacking specific intent

Team: Customer Excitement

1. Product Lead - Nobu
2. Engineering Lead - Felix
3. Program Manager - Justin
4. UX Lead - Ben
5. Design Director - Stephen
6. Visual Designer - Scotty
7. Front-end Engineer - Nathan
8. Front-end Engineer - Nabila
9. QA Engineer - Emma
10. Engineering Sponsor - Mike (CTO)

• Executive Sponsor - Kevin (CEO)
• Advisor / Advocate - David (VP Product)
• Marketing Partner - Jason
• QA Engineer - Darrell

Why Now

• Traffic is generally flat
• New user subs is flat
• Un-sub rate is high
• Competitors are innovating faster
• Core experience hasn’t changed much in awhile

The Opportunities

• Elevate the fun and exciting shopping experience at Gilt
• Explore integration with third party services to enhance customer experience
• Build a stronger relationship with our customers

Discover

Vision: I supported our Product Lead to shape the Product Vision. This included defining the mission, design principles, prioritization process, key performance indicators, conceptual framework, and opportunity areas.

Explore: I collected and generated concepts from anywhere and everywhere (core team members, user feedback channels, stakeholders from various verticals, Gilt archives, other companies, other experiences, my imagination, etc.) and then "normalized" them for analysis. In order to rapidly explore ideas, I planned and directed a fun and productive off-site workshop of Gilt employees from various teams. It was also my responsibility to capture photos and audio, which we would use to synthesize the learnings.

Design & Test

The discovery phase led to two leading ideas. For these ideas, I prepared wire-frame prototypes to test with users. I collaborated with Gilt's in-house user researcher to define the script and to extract the insights that might help us proceed. He recruited four individuals for the usability session, recorded the session, and summarized the findings. Users were selected by age, profession, lifetime purchase, purchase in last 6 months, and date membership began. Our team observed in a separate room. We continued to test iterations internally, and I did some motion experiments in a tool that dates me (swf output).

1. "Shop the Look" was about building outfits, mixing and matching products, and offering products across Gilt Properties.
Key insights:
• Book - reveals limited content, hot spots underwhelming, less shoppable
• Column - triggers a desire to shop by category, requires too much thinking, sorting / filtering not likely to be utilized


2. "Gilt Live" (Kaiten Zushi / Feed) was about a totally new passive way to shop and was inspired by this idea of conveyor belt sushi - motion, urgency, activity, social curation. Additional possibilities included unique filtering and editorialization by color.
Key insights:
• Limited quantity indicator might be interesting
• Filters are overwhelming
• Personalization vs Discovery
• "Trending" label may be unclear and doesn't fit essence of Gilt
• "Refresh" button may be unclear

Harden Designs

I collaborated on the look and feel to generate final assets for Gilt Live (the destination) and its integration points (primary navigation, sidebar, lower animated module, and social media presences). I then documented a summary including the basic flows (download pdf) and a sample of those pages here:

Outcome

I learned that the experiment was well-received by many shoppers including Gilt stakeholders and employees. However, I had moved on to the next challenge before I was able to capture/document performance.