La Sportiva - Online Retailer
La Sportiva (concept)
Practicing information architecture and visual design foundations in a concept project
In preparation for my UX career, I spent some time on a concept project focused around a mountaineering company that I could apply learnings and practices from courses I had taken.
Project Goals
Improve the information architecture to reduce friction for users
The existing information architecture had a confusing organization of products and pages. A restructured information architecture had the opportunity to reduce friction in the buyer’s journey.
Align the site’s aesthetics with the brand’s mission statement
Exploring a visual redesign using existing content to fully convey the inspiring mission statement of La Sportiva.
The Process
Client Research
La Sportiva is a high-end mountaineering company that provides apparel and equipment. Their mission is to give their customers,
"Products that let you go where you dream to go, do what you dream to do and live how you want to live."
La Sportiva's product offerings are in the rock-climbing, trail running, hiking, and skiing markets with messaging emphasizing their heritage and innovation. La Sportiva's customers aren't novices at the sport they participate in, they are athletes who are serious about their performance and gear and are willing to pay a premium for it.
Restructuring the Information Architecture
Shopping through the mobile experience currently restricts users by requiring navigating through unnecessary layers such as broad categories such as, "Footwear" and "Clothing". Only once users are within one of these broad categories could they filter by activity type; a somewhat hidden feature.
The existing experience creates a frustrating and unnecessary step in users' purchase path by adding noise in the form of displaying products unrelated to their activity of interest.
Instead of organizing products by high-level categories which require additional steps to filter by activity, the experience could benefit by moving that filter upstream and remapping products by activity type.
As mentioned earlier, La Sportiva's customers are typically experts in their respective activity type and as a result will most likely only view products related to their sport.
Aligning to the Brand’s Mission Statement
Currently, the overall design felt disconnected from the idea that these products, "let you go where you dream to go, do what you dream to do and live how you want to live.”
To close the gap between the existing design and the brand's mission statement, visuals with human activity are emphasized in the design to inspire users to imagine themselves doing the activities.
La Sportiva invests heavily in their Ambassadors, this new design also highlights their involvement with the brand which adds additional social proof of the trust in their products.
Slimming down the menu bar and modifying the typography updates the current interface to convey a high-end, and innovative brand.
Final Thoughts
Recognizing this was a concept and not a full project with a real client there are some shortcomings of this design process that should be recognized.
01
Iterating at Lower Fidelity
As this was a project to hone my skill set, I made the conscious decision to not do low-fidelity designs and instead practice my high fidelity design work. Had this not been for practice, I would have started in low fidelity and iterated slowly over time to finally bring the project to high fidelity.
02
User Testing
There was a large assumption here made about usability and concept testing. If this were a more fleshed out project, I would have done usability testing before restructuring the information architecture. This could have included card sorting or unmoderated usability tests.