Condé Nast
Vogue Fashion Shows
Designing a fresh way to deliver fashion show photography and editorial to Vogue's discerning European users.
Background and context
Previously, Condé Nast's brands across Europe operated in silos - each having their own website and CMS. This resulted in content publication being duplicated across markets, with user experiences lacking consistency.
There was therefore a real need for the technology across the markets to be unified into a single technology platform. Whilst unified thinking was decided for the back-end, there would be a big drive to unify the front-end user experience across all brands.
With Vogue being the jewel in Condé Nast's crown, it was decided to update the fashion shows user experience - making it consistent across Europe and the UK.
Role and approach
My role was primarily UI designer but with a UX cross-over. I worked with a UX researcher/designer to translate user research outputs requirements into the actual user experience. We worked in a small dedicated team consisting of a product manager, project manager and 4 developers.
Condé Nast has a pool of users we can call upon to conduct qualitive user research and to test prototypes. We also held internal workshops with Editorial to better understand their perspective on what was currently lacking, and where future opportunities for improvement existed.
We focused on the fashion professional, who requires quick access to high quality photography, together with razor sharp coverage and commentary from Vogue's editors. This allowed casual users to dip in and view top level show pieces, whilst also providing deeper content and detailed photography for professional users.
Outcome
Timing was paramount - ensuring that we were ready to launch alongside the new back-end technology stack.
With improved discoverability and better page structure and SEO, Fashion Shows experienced an immediate uplift in session times and page views. Organic search was greatly improved and duplication of work decreased considerably for the editorial production team.
The European fashion shows experience has since been folded into a global experience. However, many of the outputs and still inform todays experience.
We started by conducting interviews using Vogue's dedicated user group. We conducted interviews to understand and define specific user types, and to map out their current perspective of the Fashion shows experience, to understand their current pain points and unmet needs.
Key Takeaways from the User research included: Mobile first, speed of delivery for latest shows, Search by Brand - Season - year, Image led but access to editorial voice, gallery details, saving images, improve search.
We swept through the entire Fashion Shows experience. Starting with the Fashion Shows landing pages, we redesigned the Designer show pages, galleries and search features - providing a clean, fresh and easy-to-discover experience.
