Antique
Candle Co.
In this project, we worked with Antique Candle Co, a local company in Lafayette, IN, to create a better mobile shopping experience for their customers. We focused primarily on simplifying the checkout flow, as well as organizing the fragrance page. Because we worked with a candle company, we wanted to see if we could innovate the way that users shop for scents and fragrances online.
Tools
Figma, Miro, Canva
Year
2023
Client
Antique Candle Co.
How can we improve the usability and checkout flow of the Antique Candle Co. website on mobile?
Problem Statement
Our user group is primarily focused on 26-41 year old millennial women with a higher than average disposable income. This was determined after our primary research and consultation with our sponsor, Keliann.
User Group
After talking with our sponsors and doing our own evaluation of the site, our team narrowed our focus to the two largest pain points we came across
Improved fragrance page
Simplified checkout flow
Project Goals
Final Designs
Fragrance Page
Our Redesign
Original Design
The fragrance page was a major focus for our group during this project, as it is a high-traffic page for customers as they look through the many fragrances. We wanted to make it a cleaner and more visual appealing and functional layout that allowed the users to browse more thoroughly.
List of Products
Our Redesign
Original Design
With the product listing page, our goal was to add a Quick Add feature that allowed the user to easily keep shopping through candles without the cart continuously appearing.
Bag
Product Listing
Original Design
Our Redesign
We wanted to create a more informational product listing page where the user could easily view the scent strengths and notes, ingredients, and reviews.
Original Design
Our Redesign
On the Bag page we wanted to try to influence users to buy more products, whether through the "frequently paired with" section or the "buy more and save" bar at the top of the screen.
The Process
Our team worked to find the main habits of users when buying fragrances. We did this through interviews, market research, surveys, and help from our sponsor. Our findings included...
User Research
Scent Notes
Scent notes and strength of scent strongly influence buyer’s decisions when purchasing a fragrance.
Reviews
The reviews left by other customers have a strong impact on buyer’s choices.
Imagery
Providing visual imagery for fragrances is essential for customer’s decisions
Organization
Customers prefer when scents are organized by their similarities
Whiteboard Ideation: Checkout Flow
After our research we moved into our ideating phase. Each member of the team came up with a sketch and we then discussed features we wanted to move forward with. Some features we agreed on were the "best paired with", quick add, and an "added to bag" pop-up.
Mid Fi’s: Checkout Flow
We then took those ideas and used Figma to create our first round of mid-fidelity wireframes. We were able to test these screens with other designers and draw insights into what needed to be improved upon before hi-fi's.
Whiteboard Ideation: Fragrance Page
Before starting any hi-fi's we wanted to ideate on how we could also improve the fragrance page. Our team came up with ideas such as boxes to organize each fragrance category, a carousel of each scent within the category, or a mixture of the two - which is the idea we ultimately decided upon.
High Fi’s: Combining Fragrance Page and Checkout Flow
After developing a good understanding of how we wanted the fragrance page to look, we then combined both our ideas for the checkout flow and the fragrance page and created our first round of hi-fi's.
Before Final Iteration
After creating our first round of hi-fi's we did Wizard of Oz testing with other designers and presented them to our sponsors before we made our final changes which included adding an all fragrances category, muting our colors to match the company style better, and making the carousel more rectangle instead of square to match the structure of the site.
Reflection
I think our team did a great job of splitting the work load up evenly and all having an equal share of the project. Some pieces that I took a larger role in were the comparative analysis with other fragrance-selling companies and the trends within that market. I also took a large part on designing the product listing page, the scent notes and strengths, and the reviews.
My Contribution
This project was definitely one of my favorite ones I have worked on in my UX career. I am very interested in the UI of customer-facing websites and apps so this was of great interest to me. I think our team was able to grow a lot as designers with our communication skills to sponsors not familiar with UX and UI design. We all had to adjust our ways of communicating in order to better explain our processes and ideas and I believe that was a good learning opportunity for us all. We also grew in our abilities to research customer habits through interviews, surveys, etc. It was interesting to look at other companies and how they approached the challenge of selling fragrances online when customers do not get the opportunity to physically smell them before purchase. We got a lot of creative freedom within this project and our team was able to have a lot of fun. Overall, we are proud of the work we did!