Tailored Brands Flashcards
Tell me about yourself./Walk me through your resume.
I began my design journey with a degree in visual communication at a fashion design school and worked as a digital graphic designer in the fashion industry which trained me with a solid understanding of design principles. and gradually progressed to a Product/UX designer and I’ve been in this role for the past 5 years.
As I developed an interest in UX, I got my first UX certificate from Interaction Design Foundation and started my UX career working on a business listing/networking mobile app to promote and support women entrepreneurs called OYA.
Then during Covid, I got my second certificate with Career Foundry and worked as a freelancer on short terms projects for a few different agencies that had clients with Chegg, Terra Kaffe, Anthem, etc. So I worked in a few different industries.
and most recently, I spent the past year, I was a product designer at David’s Bridal.
I worked on redesigning their e-commerce site alongside designing their new wedding planning platform and vendor marketplace.
Sadly, there was a massive layoff, and our whole product team, including myself, had to be let go.
But while working on David’s e-commerce, I developed an interest in it, which led me to pursue my e-commerce UX certification from Baymard’s to specialize in this area. I’m still currently working on.
and I’m looking to continue my career in the e-commerce industry.
Why are you interested in this role? / What do you think makes you a good fit for this role?
I’m passionate about the fashion industry and e-commerce UX, and I’m not sure whether I’ll be assigned to one specific Tailored Brands brand or work across all of them, but the opportunity to contribute to multiple brands feels like a stimulating design challenge.
Just like David’s Bridal, it looks like Tailored Brands is also focusing on a more digital-first approach and it’s exciting to be part of that “transformation” phase.
Experience at David’s Bridal
Yeah! During my time at David’s, I had the opportunity to work on two major projects: redesigning their e-commerce site as well as their new wedding planning platform from its inception to launch.
I collaborated with my UX designer colleague to redesign the e-commerce shopping experience and in this collaboration, I took on the task of redesigning both the Product Listing Page and the Product Detail Page.
Additionally, I worked on Pearl by David’s which is a wedding planning platform and vendor marketplace. As part of this project, we implemented several essential features, including a wedding checklist & countdown, a user-friendly website and registry builder, a vision board, booking and managing your vendors, and a centralized dashboard. These tools were carefully designed to provide engaged couples with everything they need to experience a stress-free wedding planning process.
What is your design process?
My design process is iterative, but it usually starts with understanding the users as well as the business goals so we can define the problem statement and set clear design objectives that benefit both the users and the business.
After I conduct user research, I compile it to create any documents that’ll be helpful in establishing design objectives. This could include creating user personas, journey maps, or empathy maps to visualize user insights.
and then I’ll use these references throughout the design process to help me guide decision-making.
After I identify the problems to solve, I proceed to develop wireframes and prototypes at varying levels of fidelity. Once it’s ready, I put them through a feedback loop to make iterative improvements.
After that, I conduct usability testing and make any necessary adjustments before handing it off to the development team.
And this process is iterative and flexible.
USABILITY TESTING
In testing our product designs, we use various methodologies to ensure its usability. We often used A/B testing on our e-commerce site.
An example of when we conducted A/B testing. We redesigned the category buttons on our e-commerce homepage to include images associated with each category. After running the test, we found that this new design performed significantly better, it had a higher user engagement and increased the CTR.
I also like to conduct heuristic evaluations to evaluate our site’s usability. I assess the design based on usability principles and best practices. This is great when you have resource constraints.
I also analyze user feedback from our support channels to understand their experiences and satisfaction levels.
STAKEHOLDER COLLABORATION
In my design process, I collaborate with various stakeholders, such as UX designers, the graphics team, product managers, the development team, and executives. We all work as a team to ensure that our user experiences are seamless, our designs align with business objectives, and we create products that are feasible and successful.
Engaging with executives helps to gain support for our design decisions. Through clear and concise presentations, we showcase the rationale behind our design choices, demonstrating how they align with the overall business strategy and user needs.
PRODUCT MANAGER
I worked with my product managers closely. A lot of our interactions are about new features or design needs.
Depending on the scale of the request, we might discuss acceptance requirements and all possible use cases, as well as review any research, if available (user data gathered from google analytics and Hotjar).
I’ll take that information and put together some wireframes or high-fidelity designs and regroup and review.
If there’s any feedback, I’ll iterate.
DEV TEAM
I work closely with dev team throughout the design process, I like to involve them early on to ensure feasibility and consider technical constraints.
By working together with developers from the start, we can tackle potential challenges head-on, which helps us avoid expensive revisions or delays later on, and it helps the team strike a balance between delivering an exceptional user experience and a seamless implementation.
WORK CHALLENGE EXPERIENCE
During the launch of our wedding planning platform, we ran a problem with a missing feature for our bigger clients like Indochino and Marriott.
They needed the ability to create multiple webstores for their various locations, and at the time we only thought of businesses with one location.
These bigger clients are a crucial revenue stream for David’s Bridal, and getting these clients on board was a top priority.
So to address the issue, we worked diligently to develop the required feature within two design sprints. This experience taught me of the importance of considering all possible use cases and thorough planning and foresight when especially dealing with critical features
How does the approach of a UX designer change when considering e-commerce?
What are the most important points or pillars of e-commerce that a UX designer should consider when adapting their approach?
When thinking about UX design for e-commerce I think the main goal is to convert visitors into customers, users are much less likely to shop with a site again after having a bad experience, so my main focus is on providing the best shopping experience.
Basically I’m looking to create a fun, fast and easy time for the users while they shop, maybe even make them feel special with personalization (recommended for you, based on your last purchase).
To make that happen I tend to focus on:
- Easy to use experiences. For example, mobile responsive designs since today mobile shopping experiences are becoming top priority for e-commerce with users converting more and more to mobile experiences. I also like to make sure the navigation is placed in an intuitive and easy to control area, with a very noticeable search field. And I think an important one is easy checkout, with one page checkouts that include digital wallets.
What are your strengths and weaknesses?
My best strengh is eagerness to learn. I’m very passionate about product design and I am very motivated to be great at it through an informal education.
My weakness is I would like to improve my speaking skills. When I’m nervous or caught off guard, I tend to freeze so I need continue practicing those skills. Also naming my figma layers.
Do you have any questions for us?
- What does the UX team look like and who would I be working with on a daily basis?
- and I like to ask what does the first 3 months look like for a new product designer?
- Can I also ask what the rest of the interview process is like?
Ending.
Thank you for having me and taking the time. I really enjoyed this.
Hope you guys have a good weekend!
How is designing for mobile e-commerce different?
For mobile, I keep in mind that the design needs to prioritize easy touch-based engagement like autofill or tap or double tap gestures. Making sure that all main calls to action are placed in the area that’s most accessible with your thumb.
- I also put a lot of focus into personalization which from what I can see is really becoming a must have for e-commerce sites. For example creating recommendations based on previous user actions, previous purchases, search history or any other personal data we can collect.
when you can extract the most value from different perspectives.
A bad designer gets super defensive or just ignores that feedback and a good designer actually teaches the people around them how to give feedback that’s useful.
If you want to extract good feedback one way is to change the format of your design to highlight the feedback that you want. eg.) if you want feedback on the branding maybe you replace all your text with lorem ipsum. If you want to highlight the layout maybe you grayscale your design if you want to highlight an interaction you might use a wireflow instead of high fidelity . Just being really articulate and clear on like this is what I exactly want feedback on.
A bad designer would be like here’s my design what di o you think a good designer is like ok I want to solve thsi. this is what i optimized for and this is the trade-offs I made. Can you please give me specific feedbakc on this interaction pattern or do you think this interaction or layout helps me achieve the goal or optimizes towards this like use case or metric.
