
ROLE
Sole Content Strategist, Content Audit, Information Architecture, Taxonomy, User Personas, User Journeys, Copywriting, Social Lookbook
THE PROJECT
Build a consumer site worthy for ‘The Amethyst Store’. Marketed solely through Facebook and Instagram, The Amethyst Store brand couldn’t show substantial sale of their product or access international customers. They needed a site that instantly conveyed what the company was and the unique capacity of its product that instilled confidence in the customers.
A luxury site for the luxurious products. Recognizing that The Amethyst Store was a remarkable jewelry brand in South India, I engaged in developing a positive site, working alongside the design and the research teams. User pathways guide visitors through content, encouraging them to access the products. Through a month-long Research, Architecture and Discovery phase, we developed user personas, a content strategy guide, site designs, and a custom shopping cart.
THE STRATEGY
Smart User Pathways - Page architecture and copy embody the high-end nature of the company. Content and page structure provide value at every turn while indicating next steps and prompting user choice. It is a modern e-commerce concept that generated a standing ovation from the client.
WHY SHOULD YOU CARE?
THE BUSINESS
The Amethyst Store is a leading Silver-Jewelry brands in India founded by Srinithi Ravi in 2012. Through jewellery sales and production, the company employs women with little to no education from a poor income background or affected by homelessness. This is a business model that I would always get onboard with!
In January 2020, the Founder, Srinithi Ravi, tasked me with developing the content and the design plan for The Amethyst Store website and mobile application to facilitate convenient shopping experience. I conducted an in-person interview with the Head of Marketing and the Founder along with the UX Research team.
Like many other businesses, The Amethyst Store moved into e-commerce as a result of the Coronavirus pandemic. Today, their e-commerce is going strong, accounting for the majority of their sales. A good portion of their e-Commerce sales is generated from Facebook and Instagram marketing. From the interview, the following insights were gathered:
Customers first see a product that they like on Facebook or Instagram, but they sometime have difficulties finding that product on their website. There is no direct Facebook to e-commerce link.
The search function on the website isn’t great ad the product categories are confusing. This causes difficulties finding advertised products on the website.
Customers often buy matching products to create a set, however the products are not linked together on the website so customers must search for each item individually.
Armed with these insights, I worked along with the research and design teams to explore on how best we could improve the existing version of the website (linked with the parent company’s website). We hypothesized that it is best to create a separate website for the company, removing itself from the parent company’s website. In addition we identified that it is important to better classify the products and related product suggestions to enhance the user experience.
THE RESEARCH
Along with the research team, I created a user journey map highlighting the user’s major pain points with the current The Amethyst Store’s website.
THE PROBLEM
Based on our research, we narrowed down the problem statement for our design:
The user needs to be able to easily find the products they want without having to search through dozens of products.
IDENTIFYING A SOLUTION
With this problem statement in mind, we decided to tackle the website’s information architecture and product categories with two moderated and open card sorting exercises.
Card Sorting
I engaged in recruiting participants for the card sorting task. In the first task, I had a group of four volunteers sort through cards with images of products and create categories, necklaces, rings, bracelets, and earrings, with the earring category split into four subcategories, drop earrings, hoops, studs, and picture earrings. This resulted in fewer product categories than what is currently on their website.
For the second card sorting task, working with the research team, I had the volunteers organize the website content in a way that made the most sense to them. Based on these findings, we created a new site map.