Ryan Stoltzfus, Rachel Liu, and Allan Garcia developed a Wix e-commerce website for our client, Carmen Smith, for her business, Hush-Hush. Hush-Hush is an intimate lingerie and adult toy store that hosts annual lingerie fashion shows. We developed e-commerce functionality, designed portfolio pages for media from events, and provided training and documentation to make the solution sustainable.
The client sells intimate lingerie apparel and adult pleasure products in addition to hosting annual lingerie fashion shows and private home parties featuring erotic poetry and dancing. She was relatively unfamiliar with developing sites as she had contracted out maintenance and development of her previous Wordpress site. That site has been inactive during COVID-19 and she could not access it.
Our solution was to build Carmen a new Wix site. We devised a color scheme based on images Carmen liked. The shopping flow was designed to drive traffic to sales through clearly displayed call to actions, featured products (on the home and product pages), and through an intuitive nav-bar. We developed training materials and demonstrations for Wix basics such as editing text, images and sections, and entire pages; navigating the user interface; uploading products; and changing basic SEO settings.
We spent two weeks designing the website in Figma. As the website was primarily an e-commerce site, much of the user flow was standard with call to actions on a large slideshow on the landing page with suggested products below. To encapsulate the nature of the site, we chose a black theme with red and purple accents which we found to convey a playful yet intimate aesthetic. We spent time in the two week design period looking at competitors that we found and that Carmen introduced. We used high contrast colors, a mix of serif and sans serif fonts, and large high quality images. The design started off with little color, but we gradually found ways to incorporate the red and purple accents into more places. We iterated on our designs in Figma by making low and then high fidelity wireframes. We communicated all of our designs in our weekly client meetings by showing the updates to the design. We continued to adjust our designs according to our client’s feedback until we had achieved the aesthetic we were satisfied with.
For our solution, we chose Wix as it was one of the more beginner-friendly platforms with its drag-and-drop editor and customizability. After our first week of onboarding and 2 week design sprint, we began development of the site. We spent three weeks building out the main pages of the site. During the seventh week of development, we performed user testing. We completed revisions based on feedback, SEO basics, ADA checks, and QA checks during the final three weeks of the project. We faced an obstacle in designing the events page for displaying media and information for Hush-Hush’s lingerie fashion shows and private home parties: after many design iterations, the page still looked unsatisfactory. We brought in two PMs who had led over five projects each to give design feedback which helped in improving the design.
During our weekly client meetings, we held a feedback session for the first roughly fifteen to twenty minutes where we showed all of our relevant work for the week to our client and solicited feedback by asking pointed questions about anything we were unsure about. We discussed the feedback as a team following these sessions to identify changes that needed to be made. For user testing, Carmen gave us a list of prior customers and people she knew. We emailed the users and ended up having 1 user respond. We also interviewed 5 additional people to supplement the lack of responses. We wrote a standardized script with an emphasis on key flows in the site. We then asked them questions about the design of the site, how easy they feel it is to navigate, and specific wordings and design elements that we were unsure about. From our user testing, we got positive feedback about the site’s ease of use and specific areas for improvement in the events page and home page.
Our client had experience with managing products and sales on a Wordpress site but previously contracted out maintenance and development. Thus, most of our training was focused on maintenance and development. Our training was two-fold with weekly training demonstrations and walkthroughs with accompanying video documentations. Our training began with the basics, going over the basic UI and basic functions (i.e. inserting/changing text). Our training sessions built on each other with sessions on inserting and editing sections and pages. We also provided video tutorials and demonstrations on SEO basics and managing products. Also important to the sustainability of the site was ensuring that it was easy for her to maintain with her tech fluency. Thus, the new web store does not contain a significant amount of custom code. Additionally, design documentation with standardized fonts, colors, and design language was provided to help our client keep the design of her site standardized as she maintains it.