LISA ZANGERL
PRODUCT DESIGNER & MANAGER
Screenshots from the Wayfair App
Visual Design by Lauren Elloitt
Get Inspired (Wayfair)
On the Wayfair website, there is a feature called "Get Inspired" where users could read articles home decorating, the best products, and more. At the time the Wayfair native apps did not have this content available on the app so we wanted to find a way to integrate into the IOS app and create an engaging native app experience.
Platform: Native Apps
Role: UX Designer
Skills: Competitive analysis, wireframes, user testing, Invision and Sketch
Kickoff
As I gathered the project requirements I learned that most users would enter the "Get Inspired" experience from an email which meant I had to consider this when designing for the feature in the app. I started by looking at both the current desktop and mobile web versions to define the key features and identify all the pages that would need to be translated into the app design. Both desktop and mobile web experiences had navigation for content categories, related stories, tags on article pages, and author pages.
Next, I did some competitive analysis research before leading a brainstorming session. Together with a visual designer from my team, we sketched out a user flow and key screens in the flow.
Hi-Fidelity Wireframes
I wanted to create a native app experience for this feature that would increase user engagement within the app so I chose to design an experience that differed from mobile web.
The first design I created incorporated more native app transitions and interactions such as swiping and flicking up to open an article. In this design, users were able to navigate to other articles by swiping left to right or by tapping on a category within the main page. Once the user went into a category page they were shown secondary navigation tabs to find more specific articles. If the user wanted to read one of the articles, they could either tap or flick up on the article card and it would expand to bring the user to the article modal.
Get Inspired Landing Page
Article Modal
User Testing
After some exploration, it became clear that more insight into how users were browsing content was needed. I conducted eight user testing sessions that focused on the desktop content experience to gain insight into how users navigated content when they were browsing. The results indicated that the majority of users navigated to new stories by clicking on "related stories" or by clicking the back button to the “Get Inspired” main page. I concluded from this research that navigation was not needed for the app experience.
Final Direction
After meeting and discussing with developers and engineers I discovered that some of the images used as the "preview image" for articles were not displayed as the opening image on the article page. This meant that the design direction I had proposed would not work for the app. I had to pivot around this constraint to accommodate photos changing so I created new wireframes that aligned closely with the mobile web experience.