Client: Arc’teryx Outdoor Clothing
Founded by local climbers in 1989, Arc’teryx is a high-quality, North Vancouver company, specializing in world-class outdoor clothing and sporting goods. They expect an extremely high attention to detail and quality to match their own legendary brand values.
Project Brief
Selecting the perfect shell jacket can be a daunting task, especially with over 80 outdoor shells offered by Arc’teryx. Every jacket is tailored for specific conditions, terrains, and activities – and there are dozens of colours and fits to further expand the variety of options available!
Without a knowledgeable, in-store expert to guide customers through the highly-technical variables online, outdoor enthusiasts had a difficult time narrowing to the perfect jacket to match their specific needs. As a result many customers didn’t make it through the purchase flow, abandoning partway through.
UX Toolkit
Stakeholder Interviews
Experience Mapping
Card Sorting
Story Mapping
Paper Prototyping
Keynote Prototyping
Interaction Design
User Interface Design
Project Objectives
Design and develop a web app that would replicate the in-store experience of having a highly-trained, knowledgeable salesperson.
- Narrow the Paradox of Choice for Arc’teryx customers, increasing conversions
- Increase customer satisfaction with the products they receive
Fun Fact
I discovered during one of our early branding exercises that a key tenet of the Arc’teryx brand is “Impending Doom” :-o
Process
Discovery
Interviewing key Arc’teryx stakeholders to understand how knowledgeable salespeople help customers wade through the variety of choices in-store, helped us understand the customer’s mental model and was essential in replicating this experience online. Customers didn’t want to know specifications (e.g., 300g and moisture-resistant outer face fabric), they wanted to understand which shell would suit their specific needs in their own terms (e.g., weighs less than a cup of coffee and is waterproof). Discovering this allowed us to narrow and bucket the vast number of variables into six parameters: activity, colour, fit and length, weight and durability, weather protection, and jacket features.
Different customers valued each of these parameters differently. Some care about weight and activity but not at all about colour, however others only cared colour and fit. To align with the varied user mental models, the app was purposefully designed with no predefined path, allowing customers to enter the experience through the variable they deemed most important.
Design & Development
By sketching out ideas, the user experience team was able to quickly iterate through various designs, coming to a number of approaches to vet with the team internally. In keeping with a lean Agile design approach, sketches were explained over video to stakeholders to help confirm a solid direction for the application before moving onto more detailed, higher-fidelity designs and prototypes.
The Team
2 UX Designers
1 Creative Directors
1 Producers
3 Developers
1 Quality Assurance
In parallel to the user experience and interaction design process, a visual design phase began. As this was my second time working with Arc’teryx, brand guidelines were well understood and I was able to quickly move to a solid visual design framework that adhered to the high standards Arc’teryx is known for. Below is an example of a style tile used on the project.
Results
We had originally hypothesized that users would need to answer 3-4 sets of the parameters to narrow their options to less than 4 jackets. The results were better than expected: customers were locating their perfect jacket after answering 2 questions or less on average. We had successfully narrowed the Paradox of Choice and increased conversion (sorry, exact numbers are under NDA).
Awards
Gold W3 Award for User Experience
Gold Communicator Award for Web Applications
Silver W3 Award for Directory or Search Engine
“As a fellow creative Sean is easy to work with and “gets it”. On the projects we have worked on together he did his homework on Arc’teryx brand standards and was able to quickly understand our identity and turn around designs that fit our brand from the first concepts. His ability to collaborate helped us work together to shortcut some of the iterative process and quickly get quality designs finalized. Great designer.”