Esprit Unnique 🦋: The best designs for a unique spirit.
📁 Overview
Esprit Unnique needed a flexible e-commerce website, which would be compatible across multiple platforms and showcase their products in a visually pleasing way. We provided an optimal website design that showcased their products on collections based on niches –all while maintaining a user-friendly interface.
👩🏻💻 My Role
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Chief Executive Officer
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Product Designer
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UX Researcher
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Visual Designer
Case Study Explained
💡 Brainstorm & Ideation | as a Visual Designer
I started from the very beginning of brainstorming how the logo would look like and deciding the primary colors for the website.
Esprit Unnique Logo
As for the name Esprit Unnique, I came up with it when I was around 9 years old. I was learning my third language which was French at that time and I thought of a word to describe myself: a unique spirit, but with a touch of french it turned out to become Esprit Unnique.
The main products are phone cases because it was the perfect combination between something tech-related and design.
🔎 Foundational Research | as a UX Researcher
For foundational research, we made a competitive analysis with Alibaba.com, to respond the question:
Why do people prefer to shop elsewhere online even though the same products are available on alibaba.com?
1
Quality concerns:
Some customers may be worried about the quality of the products offered on Alibaba, as there have been reports of counterfeit and low-quality items being sold on the site.
2
Lack of regulation:
Alibaba is primarily a marketplace for wholesalers and manufacturers, which means there is less regulation and oversight compared to retail sites. This can make it difficult for customers to trust the authenticity and quality of the products they're buying.
3
Language barrier:
Alibaba.com is primarily a Chinese website, and while it is translated in many languages but some customers may have difficulty navigating the site or communicating with sellers due to language barriers.
It's important to note that these are not universally true for all customers, and many people have had positive experiences shopping on Alibaba.com, but these are some of the reasons why some people may dislike the platform.
🔁 Information Architecture
✍️ Sketches
The website was designed both for mobile and desktop, with an emphasis on the main image at the top of the screen and a list of featured products.
🧷 Low-fidelity Prototype
Adobe XD was used to create our low-fidelity designs. Using it, we were able to create basic guidelines and bring our sketches to life. These are the screens that were designed at low-fidelity.
🪄 Hi-fidelity Prototype
I decided to have more subtle colors on the overall tone of the website in order for the images products to be the main focus and grab customers attention.
📲 Prototype | as an Interaction Designer
This prototype was built on Adobe XD to simulate how the website would interact before actually building it.
👥 Design Changes After User Testing
After launching the website, we noticed some user pain points that happened throughout the user journey:
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Shipping time
Since the products were dropshipped from China, the shipping time could take as long as three weeks. This made the customers feel anxious. To prevent this from happening from a design perspective, we added a message on the each product description page to inform the customer the long shipping times a product may have.
2
Add an "All Products" section
We decided to add an "All Products" section for indecisive users that wanted to browse without having to choose on a certain collection. This way, making the user feel more free when browsing through the website.
🎨 Design System | as a Design Program Manager
Creating the design system for the website made the design process much easier. This is a sticker sheet I made with the components that were most used on the website like the colors, icons, typography, headers and footers.
Benefits of a Design System
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Ensures consistencies in the company's brand.
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It saves time and money by increasing efficiency for individuals and teams. Members of a team will have fewer questions about design specifications, so the work can be finished more quickly.
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They are scalable. It is a system that's able to maintain performance levels when workload increases. This can be particularly helpful at a rapidly growing company like a startup.
🌟 Impact & What I Learned
This was my first ever e-commerce website. I built it when I was 16 years old. This website became the stepping stone of my interest in the tech world and designing technology for users to use.
I had no idea what I was doing at the time, but I learned a lot about user experience and how important it is for people who are using your product or service.
➡️ Moving Forward
There is still a lot to explore with Esprit Unnique such as:
What if there was a recommendation engine that suggests products based on the customer's past purchases and browsing behavior? or a notification system that alerts customers of sales and promotions on products they've shown interest in?
As an entrepreneurial spirited person, there are so many ideas that could be tested with this project. But for now, feel free to check out the current state of the website I built in the video above.
