Client: Arc’teryx Outdoor Clothing
Founded by local climbers in 1989, Arc’teryx is a high-quality, North Vancouver company, specializing in world-class outdoor clothing and sporting goods. They expect an extremely high attention to detail and quality to match their own legendary brand values.
Project Brief
Selecting the perfect shell jacket can be a daunting task, especially with over 80 outdoor shells offered by Arc’teryx. Every jacket is tailored for specific conditions, terrains, and activities – and there are dozens of colours and fits to further expand the variety of options available!
Without a knowledgeable, in-store expert to guide customers through the highly-technical variables online, outdoor enthusiasts had a difficult time narrowing to the perfect jacket to match their specific needs. As a result many customers didn’t make it through the purchase flow, abandoning partway through.
UX Toolkit
Stakeholder Interviews
Experience Mapping
Card Sorting
Story Mapping
Paper Prototyping
Keynote Prototyping
Interaction Design
User Interface Design
Project Objectives
Design and develop a web app that would replicate the in-store experience of having a highly-trained, knowledgeable salesperson.
- Narrow the Paradox of Choice for Arc’teryx customers, increasing conversions
- Increase customer satisfaction with the products they receive
The Team
2 UX Designers
1 Creative Directors
1 Producers
3 Developers
1 Quality Assurance
Fun Fact
I discovered during one of our early branding exercises that a key tenet of the Arc’teryx brand is “Impending Doom” :-o
Results
We had originally hypothesized that users would need to answer 3-4 sets of the parameters to narrow their options to less than 4 jackets. The results were better than expected: customers were locating their perfect jacket after answering 2 questions or less on average. We had successfully narrowed the Paradox of Choice and increased conversion (sorry, exact numbers are under NDA).
Awards
Gold W3 Award for User Experience
Gold Communicator Award for Web Applications
Silver W3 Award for Directory or Search Engine
“As a fellow creative Sean is easy to work with and “gets it”. On the projects we have worked on together he did his homework on Arc’teryx brand standards and was able to quickly understand our identity and turn around designs that fit our brand from the first concepts. His ability to collaborate helped us work together to shortcut some of the iterative process and quickly get quality designs finalized. Great designer.”