Everlast
UX Design, Product Thinking
Project Overview
Designing and maintaining e-commerce experience with changing user needs and business goals. Everlast was 1 of 4 websites I ran with another web designer (Hyunji Kim) during my time as Web Design Team Lead at ACI Brands.
My Role: Web Design Lead, UX Research
My contributions to this project included user testing, data analysis, as well as designing and developing the new experience using Shopify, HTML & CSS. The following designs were successfully implemented with positive business impact within the fiscal year.
Tools
Background
During the start of the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020, Everlast.ca saw exponential growth to all-time highs in sales and new customers as commercial gyms went in and out of lockdown across Canada. With fitness equipment in high demand, this was an opportunity for the brand to expand from its boxing heritage into the fitness industry.
Images shown: Increase in sales and traffic seen in 2020 vs previous year.
After speaking with the VP’s & Directors of sports & fitness, there were two primary goals for 2022. Key performance indicators included the following;
Increase Returning Customers
Re-design the Everlast e-commerce experience to convert the large influx of traffic seen into returning customers and emphasize post-purchase automations in the user journey to incentivize future purchases.
Increase Fitness Sales
Expand the brand’s recognition of boxing into the fitness category by giving new fitness products high visibility on home page & highlight new products in marketing emails.
As commercial gyms began to re-open in spring of 2021, a decline in fitness sales was evident. The new fitness products ordered at the height of the demand in 2020 began to accumulate in large quantities at the distribution warehouse.
Research: Brand History
Having partnered with many well known athletes in Boxing & MMA over decades, the brand was primarily known for boxing equipment.
Problem Statement
How do we expand the brand's fitness category with decades of boxing heritage?
Understanding User Data
Using Google Analytics data, it’s no surprise that the majority (64%) of our visitors are males between the age of 25-34 years old. While this demographic had been the most loyal customers in the boxing category, it was clear they were not as engaged with fitness products such as kettlebells, medicine balls, and hand weights.
User Flow
User flow data below validates primary interest of visitors is boxing. The high drop off rate on the home page and product collections also highlight opportunities for improvement.
After conducting a monthly usability audit, I noticed that a large portion of Q1’s fitness sales came from women. Upon bringing this trend to senior management’s attention, resources were shifted to target the female customer group with fitness products. This included recruiting female fitness influencers including. This led to the new blog page Team Everlast Canada
As we did not have a development team, I would be responsible for the development as well. During my design process, I kept in mind limitations that came with my level of development knowledge (HTML, CSS, Bootstrap, Shopify Liquid).
Another constraint I had to keep in mind was that there was no design system available. As a substitution, I often referred to the brand guidelines and treated that as my guide when it came to re-designing the UI.
Drawing from industry leaders such as Lululemon and Nike, a growing trend of grid layout was evident.
From a design perspective, the current website had been clearly designed for men interested in boxing & MMA. With this re-design, my focus was on designing a website which would focus on 4 key elements; More inclusive of all genders, increased visibility of fitness product line, more interactive elements, and increase website accessibility score. Before images below.
Before
After
The new website has better adressed the company's business goals' which include; highlights fitness items and diversity of models, all elements are WCAG accessibility compliant, and there are interactive elements on hover states.
Responsive Design
I used CSS media queries to ensure all elements were mobile and tablet friendly.
Navigation menu now had large side paddings which cause a line break. Taking up more vertical space than necessary on medium desktop screens. Yellow underline on collection filters draw user eyes away from products. Sale and cart icons do not pass accessibility contrast (WCAG compliance colour checker). Before & after design changes. shown below.
After reviewing user session recordings using Hotjar (behaviour tracking tool), many users had difficulty deciding on which glove to purchase. This pain point led to many abandoning orders with multiple different gloves in cart. A solution I implemented utilized a product recommendation quiz which helps customers find the perfect glove for their specific needs. This resulted in over $70k in conversions (from June-December 2021) directly from the quiz. See a video walkthrough of the flow below.
By utilizing user data collected from sales and tracking tools, I was able to identify user pain points, make data driven design changes, and provide senior management with recommendations on how to maximize return on investment for the website’s growth.
Growing the brand’s fitness category beyond just targeting the majority demographic has led to a 43% increase in conversion rate, 6% increase in returning customer rate, and grew email subscribers by 4,000 members (+22%).
