Client: Hyde Park Jewelers
Project: Revamp the old website for a better online shopping experience.
End Users: USA-based luxury jewelry and timepiece consumers
My Contribution: UX audit on previous site, interface design, graphic design, copywriting
Problem Statement: The Hyde Park website doesn’t offer a brand experience consistent with the in-store shopping experience, which high-end customers need and expect when shopping for luxury items. The inelegant, outdated website results in damaged brand trust and fewer sales.
The old Hyde Park website did not function reliably, nor did it look like a luxury retailer’s website. Fonts, photography, and the overall design were outdated. Although the executive team wanted us to keep many things consistent and we were working within strict external brand guidelines, we were able to modernize the site for a cleaner, more polished shopping experience.
Visit the site: www.hydeparkjewelers.com
Former homepage
Updated homepage
Process
Here’s how we went about this project:
Reviewed the current website, made notes and prepared questions for the executives
Met with executives to understand business needs and users’ needs, posed my questions and discussed general suggestions/direction. For this project, it was clear that the leadership team wanted to keep many things consistent. Their target audience was traditional/visually conservative, so they wanted to simply modernize the site and bring it onto a new platform (Magento).
Researched and spoke with different types of users in order to empathize and design a better experience (this included the sales team, executives, older adults, and younger females in the bridal jewelry demographic)
Defined site priorities for both the client’s business needs and user needs
Ideated with screenshots and drew rough sketches with a pen and paper
Created wireframes and mockups in Adobe Illustrator (some mockups used brand-provided imagery, such as recent campaigns from Cartier and Breitling)
Worked with project leads (Director of Digital Marketing, CEO and COO) iterating throughout the process
Integrated my work on the backend of Magento
Go live!
Former ethical sourcing page
Updated ethical sourcing page
Former careers page
Updated careers page
Results
Improved user experience for e-commerce and product education
Elevated the digital brand to match the in-person experience
Increased web sales*
Completely cleaned up website backend, making it easy for future designers/devs to work on the site
Glowing feedback from stakeholders
* The website went live in 2020, concurrent with the start of the pandemic and lockdowns. A pre-pandemic control was not captured.