Style Advice @Zalando
Zalando / Style Advice
* Role: Design Prime, collaborating across the organization and leading design efforts of the Style Advice team
* Problem/Opportunity Tackled: Investigate the opportunity space of integrating style advice to the Fashion Store (Zalando). Clarify the customer problem, and generate a solution that solves this problem with a remarkable experience. Collaborate across the organization and with different roles to achieve this.
ESTABLISH STAKEHOLDERS
Together with our project manager, brought together active contributors and stakeholders to keep engaged within the project at critical instances.
Storyboard customer problem x opportunity space
Created storyboards explaining high level solution, to be able to onboard stakeholders on design review sessions prior to diving deep into design decisions.
QUANTITATIVE RESEARCH
Ran a customer survey, followed by a fake door test to validate customer problem and to narrow down on possible solution directions. Collaborated with different teams to launch the experiment. The outcome was style advice (complementing wardrobe) and communication directions (preferred medium as messaging) carried on to further steps of solution design.
High Fidelity Solution Design
After narrowing down the solution space, utilizing Zalando Design System (‘The Label’), ran rapid prototyping sprints. Maintained alignment with Engineering/Product Management, moderated Design Reviews, collected feedback and iterated on the customer facing solution design.
A joyful messaging experience between stylist and customer
Besides remaining true to our design system, I’ve also opened discussions to introduce new components to our library. The nature of a new ‘messaging oriented’ medium required us to asses new asset requirements. I’m occasionally running design system alignment sessions and generating component proposals within this dialogue. In addition to this, building the communication strategy in the chat medium (and anything pre-post this session) together with copy strategy team was one of the main tasks in this project. Bringing a novel solution to the fashion store required us to work closely with central teams (such as design system and copy strategy) in addition to premises and programs within the organization.
QUALITATIVE RESEARCH & ‘LEAN DEMONSTRATIONS’
Taking a step back and looking at our solution, I proposed to try a ‘lean demonstration’ of the service we constructed. This was relevant, because our solution is focused on generating a lifestyle change and the value customers receive play a big part in the outcome. We engineered a ‘research sprint’ (something I tried for the first time) with the team. In this week we:
- Outlined a list of ‘questions we need to answer’ which may make/break the experience if not proven early
- Demonstrated a chat interaction with real style experts and customers via our Intercom account, observed these sessions with consent
- Ran 1:1 deep dive interviews both with customers and stylists, with a moderation guide tailored to each group
Empowering product managers with research know-how and on the job training, to support our research efforts helped us achieve our goals as a team. The collaboration in fast pace enabled us to reach clear answers to our most critical questions. We are now working on fine-tuning the experience with customer/stylist insights to solve our customer problem in a remarkable fashion.
PROVIDING IDEAS ACROSS PILLARS
We were also able to generate ideas and pitch them, generate excitement and collaborate across pillars to provide advice. Below showcase is an example of an advice platform for Beauty within Social Media context. In this example, the advice is based on beauty+style, the communication method is not 1:1 but is 1 to many. This presents the flexibility of our solution and growth-scaling opportunities in the future.