Design leader and UX specialist.
From sparkles to spices
PRODUCT DESIGN, ECOMMERCE, UX
Head of Product & Design, Curtis Fitch Ltd
January 2019 - present​
As part of the digital transformation work with De Beers, we wanted to explore the consumer market for D2C and B2C opportunities. Along with the direct sales value, the consumer data and analytics could directly inform and optimise De Beer's upstream activities.
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Existing ecommerce platforms had experienced performance issues during special events like Black Friday. Other platforms were too expensive; some didn't allow shop owners enough flexibility to convey their own brand.
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We had built the Rockin auction platform on AWS technology and had received very positive feedback in our well-architected review. Rather than adopting a third-party solution, we decided to build out our existing scaleable auction platform into a full ecommerce solution for luxury brands.
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How do you design, build and populate a new ecommerce marketplace?
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Discovery
In 2019 we started exploring new B2C opportunities with De Beers. I travelled to New York and Chicago to oversee focus groups with the initial target demographic of female consumers who self-purchase high-value luxury items. The research was very useful and gave us some good insight into the products that could be popular, how we might present those products, and the branding and messaging that would appeal to our audience.
Back in the UK, we partnered with the Baymard Institute so we could make use of their best-practice UX guidelines as a starting point for the design of our platform. Baymard's extensive research showed us that no-one gets the UX right.
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One area we had to tackle was the checkout process. In the existing auction platform, users are pre-registered and are invoiced by De Beers for any purchases they make on the platform.
We would need to provide a full checkout and order confirmation flow for consumers.
To understand consumer attitudes and behaviour, we carried out our own research. One activity saw us hiring. space in a Cheltenham shopping arcade, offering people free coffee for 5 minutes of their time trying a couple of prototypes. We used these sessions to talk to people and gain insight into attitudes towards payment methods like Apple Pay and PayPal.
Definition and design
We used the Baymard guidelines to create conceptual layouts for homepage, product listings and detail pages. We wanted to keep to a single platform architecture using configuration and a data-driven interface to present different flavours of functionality and user experience.
We started by laying out content blocks and labelling them according to how they would be used. We started with the De Beers layout and simplified it so it could be applied generically.
We continued to validate our designs with further research activities, including returning to the arcade and talking to shoppers.
One of our goals was to create the most flexible platform we could, future-proofing for any new opportunities that might come up. We also wanted to gather as much user data as possible from the platform so we could revisit and optimes designs and user journeys.
We decided the quickest way to do this was to use the platform to sell products that would generate high volumes of visits and user data. Our CEO had a side hustle of a spice subscription service called Tyga. We would create an instance of the platform to sell Tyga products online.
Using the same templates created for De Beers and the online jewellery store, we started to mock-up how Tyga products would be presented.
We included express checkout options based on the research we'd carried out. The platform supports Apple Pay, Google Pay, PayPal, and Klarna for split payments.
Content
In parrallel to the design research work we had started to speak to local independent jewellery designers. We wanted to understand which platforms they'd tried, and what their experience of selling online had been so far. We captured the results of this research in the form of designer personas.
The primary focus of the Rockin marketplace was gathering product and user data to inform the wider work with De Beers. To get an initial inventory of products we offered the platform as 'free forever' to the independent jewellers that had helped us with the research.
Our research had illustrated the importance of photography for online jewellery. Some designers had suitable imagery but most had a very limited set of visuals to go with their products. There was an obvious skills gap (and technical/financial challenges) in designers being able to produce the high quality photography that would be needed for the platform.
We had identified social as a critical step in many ecommerce customer journeys. The New York research told us that a huge amount of purchases start with seeing an item or a look on a social media platform.
With no way to get the imagery we wanted for the site we decided to offer photoshoots that would cover product and lifestyle shots. We recruited a content team to produce photography and social content for Rockin. We converted one of our office rooms into a dedicated photo studio and invested in specialist ecommerce photography equipment. We also carried out location shoots to provide imagery for specific social campaigns and product collections.
Impact
We use a combination of data tools, such as Google Analytics and FullStory to understand how users are interacting with the various platform instances. Looking at consumer journey funnels has directly impacted how we design the user experience for the diamond platforms. We see a strong correlation between the B2B and B2C platforms, with the rough diamond customers acknowledging that the diamond buying process is much more familiar to them now as a standard ecommerce experience.
The data we gather from FullStory not only gives us insights into the UX and design of the platform, but also the types of products consumers are looking at. Identifying trends here allows us to provide trends to the designers on the platform that means they can focus on pieces that are likely to sell. We can also provide De Beers with instant trend information so their manufacturing and mining operations can focus on the stone shapes and types that are in demand.
Today
Today, Rockin is a mature platform that handles most of the core functions of an ecommerce platform. It is flexible and scaleable, providing a range of different solutions to De Beers in the B2B and B2C markets.
Rockin has also been shown to be capable of handling different luxury products. The Tyga instance is a successful consumer offering, and has allowed us to capture a wealth of data on user behaviour around areas such as subscriptions and preferences.
Rockin continues to be the go-to platform for De Beers and their broad digital transformation project. Work continues to design additional functionality and innovative ways of presenting complex imagery.