iphone & ipad Apps
Nasty Gal's native iPhone and iPad apps were part of a company-wide effort to redefine the brand's eCommerce presence. They brought together branded, streamlined tactile simplicity, and a superior shopping experience which enabled users to celebrate the Nasty Gal brand.​
app Store top ten list
Top Ten List in both "Lifestyle" and "All Catagories" views for eleven weeks.
simple, Easy, and Intuitive
-
Clean, stacked grid user interface design
-
Pull down search with product display underneath
-
Collection tools integrated into the shopping experience
-
Drag and drop functionality
The process
The Challenge:
Nasty Gal needs an eCommerce solution that provides both a pleasurable shopping experience and opportunities for Nasty Gal users to celebrate the brand.
The Solution:
Create a modern, branded shopping experience as an iOS application for both iPhone & iPad.
01 Strategy
A New Discipline
At this time, UX was a new discipline at Nasty Gal. The UX team worked closely with management, project and product managers, and developers to understand the software development lifecycle. I worked to support a dedicated UX process and align it with a user-centric, agile workflow. Additionally worked with Product Managers to establish a clear and coherent PRD.
​
Deliverables:
Updated Product Requirements Documents​ (PRD)
User Story entries in Jira (Agile project management software
02 discovery
Gathering Evidence and Perspective
I began by initiating a collaboration with customer support and the marketing team. Looking at existing website analytics gave me a few clues as to what the users were doing on the site. Also compared features, tasks, and UI's from competitors which gave us a start on the perspectives that would inform design. I captured these perspectives in artifact documents and created surveys that would help the team gain a clearer understanding of our customers and their needs.
​
Deliverables:
User Survey with results
Comparative Feature Analysis
Competitive UI Analysis
Personas or Target Users
03 definition
The Right Technology Paradigm
The team considered information architecture design patterns that worked best for eCommerce. These information paradigms enabled us to create baseline understandings that informed information architectures for all goal-directed experiences. I advocated for focus on the product list as the interaction hub since I identified from our analytics that most of our successful interactions start there.
​
Deliverables:
iOS App Information Architecture Schema
Information Architecture Diagram
User Flows
05 design
Clean, Tactile Design
The data I harvested in our Discovery phase from interviews and surveys implicated our user's interest in tactile experiences, which I advocated for in the designs and prototype. Drag and drop functionality, specifically, seemed to be high on the list of needs of our users. We used this affordance in a variety of places in the app. The users interest in a more tactile experience was also made evident in my user tests.
​
Deliverables:
Annotated Wire Frames (Axure)
Mocks (Photoshop & Axure)
Apple HIG Redlines
06 ProTotype & usability
Creating a Complete Picture
While testing our prototype's usability we noticed that most of our users instinctively attempted to use two gestures when engaging with an iOS device: "swipe" and "drag and drop." As stated before, both tactile gestures were evident in the user tests and then implemented. We also learned our users were more motivated to browse and pick an item from the product list than from the product description page, which validated my original advocacy of the product page as the primary interaction hub. The final issue was in performance, specifically in page load and image load times. In eCommerce, load time is crucial for conversion. So, we took another look at what we could do to increase this performance. We opted to slightly down-res the images and also chose a different batch loading strategy to address this.
​
Deliverables:
Usability Testing Report
Usability Survey Results
07 release
Share The Love
Upon their release, the Nasty Gal iPhone and iPad apps were very well received. Both remained on Apple's App Store top 10 list for eleven weeks. Post release, we distributed a very basic survey on overall satisfaction to our users through email, which generated mostly positive results. We did notice, still, that some of our users brought up performance issues in the last section of the survey, which gave us things to work on for update.
​
Deliverables:
Post Release Survey and Report
Post Release Analytics (Google Analytics)
