Thrift+
Design lead on a revamped shopping platform for the UK's leading preloved clothing platform
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Thrift+
I worked with Thrift+, the B Corp-certified second-hand clothing platform to redesign their buyer and seller experience at an integral time of growth.
Thrift+ enables customers to send in bags of their unwanted clothes and take out the hassle of selling by photographing and processing them in their specialist warehouses. Each purchase of a preloved item then earns points which can be spent on other preloved items, partner rewards or donated to charity.
Problem
- Their current Shopify website was performing poorly
- The business were loosing customers in their conversion funnel
- They also weren’t attracting enough new users of their seller service
- Existing customers weren’t engaged enough to want to sell via their customer account
Goal
- Increase conversion for the purchase of preloved clothing
- Increase the uptake of their seller service for new customers
- Implement a new look & feel based on rebrand
- Improve customers’ ability to earn points from selling and spend points on rewards or charitable donations
Solution
I carried out a total redesign and restructure of their Shopify platform, including both key e-commerce functionality and customer resell accounts. As a result:
- The website conversion rate has more than doubled
- Total sales are up by 3%
Design process
Understanding the problem
- My first step was to identify friction points and opportunity areas in the existing website via an audit
- My metrics analysis exposed clear issues in the UX of the mobile conversion journey
- Lighthouse also showed that the load time of the site was painfully slow – when customers were shopping on older mobile devices they were far less likely to convert (in purchase and resell)
- After implementing UX improvements to the existing site and monitoring performance, it became clear that a redesign was needed
- I put together a content audit and sitemap so that we could track key content over the course of the project
Market research - competitor analysis
- As a starting point to the project (and because I had already done a deep dive on existing analytics) I looked at Thrift+’s competitors and put together an audit
- In an effort to avoid reinventing the wheel, I also looked to well-established ecommerce platforms (like ASOS) that set the industry standard and cherry picked patterns and best practices that were right for Thrift+
Understanding Thrift+ users and their needs
- Together with the Thrift+ team, I created customer personas based on a their own market research and survey data
- Some shoppers were clearly motivated by finding a pre-loved bargain, ome were environmentally conscious, some were time poor and so appreciate the “clear out” service Thrift+ offered, some appreciated the ability to donate to charity
- Balancing these needs on a platform redesign the size of Thrift+ was always going to be tricky - to focus my design decisions I had these personas within my Figma design doc as a constant reference
Prototyping customer journeys
- I used the customer personas we had already created and put together user journeys for each, focusing my efforts on a happy path to conversion
- I created a taxonomy map for the product meta available after garments are processed by the Thrift+ warehouse team
- Filtering UX was based on the taxonomy map and best practices found on industry-leading sites (i.e. the concept of consistent disclosure in the drawer)
- I designed in low-fidelity (i.e. greyscale, no imagery etc…) to focus the testing on functionality
- Screens were also mobile only as 78% of Thrift+ customers were shopping on mobile devices
- A joint decision was made to divide content by gender and default to women – this was because analytics from existing customers showed over 80% were female
- This business decision also meant that the overall UX was far less cluttered (compeitior sites were clumsily having to offer male/female CTAs on page level components)
- When the prototype was ready, I put together user interview scripts that we used for consistency across each round of testing
Testing & iterating
- Initial testing was very positive and participants were able to purchase items easily
- Some participants initially struggled to find the switch between genders so I ended up moving the links out of the main navigation and into a defacto “toggle” at the top of the homepage
- The theme of browsing started to come through in later rounds of testing - I started exploring more conventional favourited/liked item lists but settled on the concept of “watching” an item as each garment is unique and can be tracked in a similar fashion to eBay
- Introducing this then opened up exploring concepts like price alerts or notifying customers when an item had sold or come back onto the market – an important objective for the business in the onward shopper journey
Focusing on unique design challenges
- The reseller experience was unique to the Thrift+ business - it’s what sets them apart from their competitors
- I created a frictionless seller experience, focused on taking the hassle out of customers clearing out their wardrobe
- Customers get to quickly review photos, pricing and the meta data of all their items to be sold
- Once an items sells, customers earn points which they can use to purchase other people’s preloved items on the Thrift+ platform, or exchange for rewards with partner brands like ASOS or donate the points value to charity
Creating a visual language
- I interpreted the offline creative from the branding agency into a digital design language fit for the Thrift+ platform and influenced Marketing team to make recommended improvements on and offline
- I then layered this visual design language onto the Figma prototype and documented interactive states and behaviours of components within Figma for the development team
Results
- The website conversion rate has more than doubled
- Total sales are up by 3%
