Creating an e-commerce web site Lozana B - Jewellery crafted with love

Help local and online shops to improve their on-line presence to be more competitive in the market was the brief given to our strike team of four designers Jordane Lelong,Julie Bertrand,Rony Jean-Noël and I worked for a week to create a web site.

As a matter of fact, we did love the idea to give time to a shop of our choice to make it thrive. We choose to work with Lozana_B, an e-boutique selling fine gold-filled colourful jewellery on-line and in a boutique near Chateau de Versailles.

Lozana_B defines her work as corlorfull, minimalist, ethnic and made with love. Our team worked for over a week with Vania, the shop-owner and a jewell artist and craftswoman on the creation of her website. Our goal was to improve her on-line visibility by setting up a stable platform which reflects her personality and from which she can establish her art made with love.

From the analysis of supply and demand in the costume jewellery market performed by Victoria ….. from …., we know that :

“Costume jewellery is defined as an object manufactured industrially on a large scale in various materials such as plastic, mother-of-pearl, fabric, metal, etc. It is a mass produced jewel aiming at maximum profitability: low cost of materials, very short manufacturing time and cheap labour. Sales of this type of jewellery increased by 11% in volume in the last half of 2018 according to the Francéclat committee.

The costume jewellery offer is very diversified. First of all by the diversity of items on offer, such as necklaces, rings, earrings and with the use of different materials. This offer is available at all times of the year and is particularly popular as a gift.

There are many distributors competing in this market. The distribution is done through supermarkets, boutiques specialising in fashion accessories and jewellery (Moa, Claire’s, Bijou Brigitte…), ready-to-wear boutique chains (Pull and Bear, Stradivarius…), online shops, or small and large designers (Poow, Etsy…).”

More specifically , on her market, we tried to understand where the company fits

From ou research on Lozana_B’s Facebook and Instagram, we quickly understand that Lozana_B jewels are all about love, simplicity, inspirational modernity related to culture and inheritage allied with ethics , minimalist design but colorful with ethnic reminiscence.

From the market positionning of “The markets of the Custom Jewellery” established by l’APCE Agence pour la Création d’Entreprise i.e. with the remarks of BOCI i.e. we understand that Lozana_B belong to the mature and “niche” market on the top left quadrant of this diagram.

Vania, the business owner is close to its customers. All her jewels are hand-made and most of them are tailor-made and she follows her inspiration for the creation of these special pieces as as clients’ demands and suggestions.

As a momprener or momentrepreneur as she like to call herself, she has to juggle around her life as a mother of two young children and her entrepreneurial activity : it is a mindset and an art.

Lozana_B has one main competitor called Ysie which owns a web site, sells in the same boutique in Versailles an shares her love of semi-precious stones.

Vania, the owner of LOZANA_Bis as well in competition with all the e-shops that use miyuki and african beads as well as wemi-precious stones like and gold-filled like Maison Gaston. She is as well in competition with all the e-shops who use miyuki and african beads as well as semi-precious stones especially Ysie or Namaka.All these jewellery artists can showcase their work on Instagram and Facebook and sell on the Etsy platform.

LOZANA B is new in this market and launched her activity during the beginning of the COVID lockdown, she doesn’t know well her competition . The fact that she uses gold-filled makes her stand in her ethics but also put her in competition with other jewel designers that works with this matter, Maison Gaston is one among others.

In order to conduct Vania’s interview , we created a guide to inquire about LOZANA B, we created a guide to inquire about Lozana B’s business and goals as the reason to be of her business- her WHY as described by Simon Sinek.

We investigated the recent company launch, how the business started , the image and brand identity she has yet settled, her ambition and ask even for more information about her close competitors.

Finally, Vania shared how she feels about the business and how she’s dealing currently with her online presence and what she would like to change, how apparently she intends to improve with the creation of her website and how she will evolve in the future.

Everything she does or creates she does it with her heart.
Lozana_B defines her work as corlorfull, minimalist and ethnic and made with love. She combines different matters such as golden-filled, miyuki and african beads as well as semi precious stones and develops an universe of simplicity, inspirational modernity related to culture and heritage , minimalist and colorful with ethnic reminiscence, especially Caribbean and African influences.

When she works, family, union and harmony are concepts that intervene in the creating process of her jewellery. Following her ethics, she works with local suppliers except for specific items such as african beads.

The competion audit is described by the mean of a SWOT analysis.

We gather our findings for the competitors’s evaluation mainly about Lozana’s main competitor Ysie which possess the most interesting site to scrutiny as Ysie targets almost the same market and follows her use of semi-precious stones though without the gold-filled aspect and sells in the same shop.

The competitors heuristics evaluation is performed following the ten principles established by Jakob Nielsen in 1994 : they measure usability in digital interfaces and were published in his book Usability Engineering. Jakob Nielsen’s heuristics are probably the most popular usability heuristics for user interface design as described in the video below :

The findings for Lozana-B are gathered in the table below :

As Lozana doesn’t own a website of her own, we investigate the web to find inspiration and creative ideas in her direct or more far competitors in the jewells’world, especially from Ysie or Monsieur Paris as an example.

We study Ysie’s web site in details which is structured as follows :

From that structure -the site as is- we imagine the site for Lozana B reflecting hers goals and personality, keeping in mind that she sticks to simplicity and minimalism and her jewells collection narrows on a small number of items gathered under “our collection” and categorised as bracelets and earrings :

The current and project flow both focus on the purchasing experience

Currently, LOZANA B’s userflow begins either on Facebook or Instagram with no rates indicated. On the other hand, the future e-selling web site, the project user flow is defined as follows : Vania begins by browsing the homepage which gathers all her creations by categories : all items, bracelets and earrings.

After achieving the Vania’s userflow and site map, we developed a medium fidelity prototype. The video of the mid-fi prototype from which we will test the usability and fonctionalities of our design can be displayed below :

The team paired by two -one facilitator and one note-taker- to achieve the usability testing.

The tasks defined for the Lozana_B usability testing are as follows :

• navigate the home page
• Find the bracelets section
• choose a bracelet
• buy the bracelet

From the performance and understanding of Anne-Marie, Agathe, Julien, Jon, Lauren and Sandrine, we identified the following points to be corrected :

Consequently, we were able to iterate in order to improve our design as follows :

• change the video for an image
• add directly the price with the image of the jewel
• “Measures” was not that understandable and we replace by” and remove the quantity button
• add a third step on the breadcrumb for the buying process for better understanding

For our branding, we scrutinised the valuable insights we received during the stakeholder interview from the business owner , Vania.

Our goal was to define Lozana_B identity brand and we come up with the following brand attributes : lively, vibrant and ethnic.

While beginning to design the User Interface a.k.a.we created a moodboard by gathering images, artwork or ideas that represents Lozana’s universe and chose our favourites among them.
We then composed a moodboard that reflects her brand and help us for the creation of her e-selling website by setting style and colors.

Vania, the stakeholder, is a real life lover and is inspired from splash of colors around her and also from African cultures when crafting her jewelry. That’s the reason we defined the brand as Ethnic, Lively, and Vibrant.
As you can see from the mood-board here, we focused on a really colorful universe while integrating some ethnic elements. All the elements all-together give the impression of a dynamic brand with the yellow orange and turquoise colors.

To follow Lozana B universe of her minimalist and colourful e-selling web-site, we chose for our design a turquoise as our primary color for the brand attributes.The brand accent and functional colors are a warm & vibrant yellow-orange and an intense pink that have emerged while observing our moodboard.

In order to design a fluid and minimalist e-selling website, we organised our content with informative pictures and clear titles with concise descriptions.
We also created icons to improve harmony and sustain consistency and minimalism.

Mobile first was our approach following the current standards in design was and we began with mobile app design. Then, we created a new layout for the desktop.Here is the hi-fi prototype. Our users’s testing results were used to refine the first mid-fidelity prototype and then gathered our brand content to make our ecommerce site realistic.

We also worked on a responsive desktop version that has a bit more brand elements on the homepage that we didn’t use on mobile to make the version clean and breathing.

Across the LOZANA’s project, we learn about the jewellery industry and more specifically the costume jewellery and about the code used in selling websites in this specific industry.

The next steps for the ecommerce site of LOZANA_B will be the following :

• refine the UI by redoing usability testing
• Try desirability testing
• Use success and failure metrics

Thanks for reading me so far and feel free to comment on ecommerce, UX and UI. As well don’t forget to follow my teammates, they are talented people.