Designstripe_ iPhone 14 resting on iPad, Top Down View

Service

Product design. Designing a feature from scratch

Company

Trouva

Industry

Retail

Duration

14 months

Role

Lead Product Designer

Team

CEO, Product manager, Brand Marketing team and 2 Engineers

Problem

Trouva has a solid shoppable experience where everything you can see you can buy but wants to become a source of inspiration where every time users come back they can find something new.

— Although our model of content production is unscalable because it is done by us. Our capacity to build content is limited and our point of view and style is singular.

Assumption

To scale, we need to distribute ownership of the content production process. To do this, we’ll take a Curator-driven approach. By providing the right tools to visually merchandise their products, we can leverage the abilities and passion that our curators (boutique-owners and influencers) already possess.

Customers

After some months of user research we discovered that:

They search for broader categories or terms when

— They might not know what they want at first but they expect to find it.
— When they are looking for inspiration or simply researching.
— When they found something on instagram they like but don’t know the name or brand or when they want just something ‘similar’ to it.

Consumers tend to search when:

— They’ve already done their research, they just need a search box, some filtering, and user reviews to make their decision.
— When they want to compare the same product or type of product from one website to another.
— When they need to do it quickly.
— They didn’t find what they look for anywhere else on-site and they want to find it.

Consumers might not be entirely conscious about when and how they got inspired because:

— They are exposed to pictures of products they like every time they browse their Instagram or Pinterest feeds.
— They might see something they like and try to find it after a while without remembering the details and context of it.

Consumers spend more time browsing when they are looking for entertainment or vague research.
— They gather ideas or save them without intending to buy.
— Their research can be vague or nonspecific.
— They like to collect pictures to find those items later.

Solution

Give Curators the ability to create lists of products. Prove that we can drive adoption and add value through ensuring curators feel a sense of ownership and creativity/self-expression. 
 —
In the first phase of this project our Curators were the boutiques we work with.
— During the second phase we’ve expanded frames creating in partnership with influencers (specialised home decoration, clothing, outdoor spaces)

Ideation workshop with the team. Sketching how team image a frame to be and which elements would we use on a frame page.
Ideating frames creation flow

1st release

Constraints

Main constraints for this project was in matching supply and demand, and figuring out how we build the right levers for personalisation. At this point, we were like a radio station: what we push has to appeal to everyone who’s listening. If we wanted to become more like Spotify or Pinterest (i.e. not alienate one audience by trying to appeal to another), we had to build levers to figure out how we match the content from a set of curators with the consumers it would appeal to.

Consumers clearly expected tailored recommendations:
— They want to see frames recommended accordingly:
— The way they browse and the things they buy.

Adding Influencers/Content creators as Frames Curators

Although Boutiques where keen to produce content and create Frames they couldn’t do it within a frequency that would allow trouva to bring regular novelty to the customers.This way we started to work on the idea that the role of the curator could be extended to anyone who wanted to create a curated collection of products from our boutiques.Our goal changed to:
— Create the role of professional curator by allowing anyone to create Frames using a boutique product catalog.

Assumption:
— Creators will broadcast their style/curation using our inventory base or by creating inventory needs (showing products boutiques don’t sell yet). They will/can bring their audience to Trouva and that way we can understand better if new users will browse frames.They will receive a percentage of each sale and ability to give freebies to their followers.

Creating the first partnership with Influencers/Content creators

We’ve interviewed 12 content creators. They were all creating content around lifestyle and home decor.We’ve tested and iterated the layout components with them and iterated according to their feedback and the way they wanted to display the products.We’ve invited two of them to create frames to showcase their favourite products from trouva.com

Final userflow for mobile 1st experience

Desktop experience

Success metrics

  • Consumers clearly understand the concept of Frames and the role of a curator.

  • On days with no emails sent, recent frames sessions in a given day generally fall between 80-100. On days with emails sent, this rises to 500-1000 sessions.

  • Carousel (the last element on frames UI)  is a frequent interaction (40%), this could indicate visitors who enjoy the frame and want to see more, or visitors who haven’t seen something they liked in the main part of the frame and tried to find more.
      
  • Sessions with 1+ Frames view have CVR of 1.45% and it increases to 1.88% when a session has 2+ Frame Views.

Creating a design language

Gradually we start to think about thinking about a totally different UI as we wanted to create a different space on trouva.com where the users could browse frames.

Testing a new concept and new way of browsing for inspiration.
— Blinking an eye to Gen Z
— Creating a Colorful and impactful UI.
— Providing space to create more storytelling.
— Adding new interactive elements (such as stickers, ticker tape, shuffle).

When it comes to getting inspired, what’s clear is that Generation Z is all about social. Among 16-24 year olds, 49% look for inspiration in social – that’s compared to an average of 32%.

Learnings

This project is working as an experiment to lay the foundation that will allow us to personalise better in the future by tailoring the right content to users and therefore attract new customers. These pages aren’t accessible to a typical customer who comes from google shopping as we are redirecting users from specific user journeys to this shopping inspiration feature in order to measure engagement and iterate the layout.

The visual language I’ve created for this project is also influencing the trouva brand as well and we are changing both web and app visuals with this project as the starting point.