Please note, this article is not a UX design internship project; rather, it is a documentation of my experience as a first time UX designer at Street Style Store. To know more about the project, please write to me at [[email protected]](mailto:[email protected]?subject=From%20Medium)
This piece of story begins in the month of June, 2021, when I got an awesome opportunity to intern at the famous female centric deal site StreetStyleStore.com. Initially I was appointed as a T-Shirt graphic designer due to my well rounded Graphic Design portfolio and of course my “National Institute of Fashion Technology” tag, until I got a phone call from the co-founder, Mr. Vishal Puri. A week of uninteresting design production for the brand must have undoubtedly compelled him to do so. He said, “Anmol! What is it that you’re interested in doing, because I cannot see any progress in the T-Shirt designs you’ve been producing lately?”. To which I gently replied, “Sir, I have been studying User Experience and Digital Product Design since some time and I feel I have gained enough of the theoretical knowledge on the subject and I think I want to work on a live project in the domain, if you permit.”
It is never a necessity to start perfect in order to have a perfect outcome. Doors of opportunities can pop up anytime, anywhere. All it takes is to be focused and determined about our goals and ambitions. By the grace of the Almighty, it didn’t take Vishal sir even a minute to verbally approve me to the UX project and enlighten me with all the problems they’ve been going through on the website. The reason why he shouldered his blind trust on me for the huge task immediately has been an astonishing event for me till date. The story took a U-turn when the person who had been designing poor t-shirt graphics since the past one week with no confidence of productivity, was now being assigned one of the biggest projects of the company. I cannot thank him enough for believing in me.
The project started with an initial problem statement, “the high drop off rate of X% at the checkout”. The task was to reduce that. As the project progressed, the problem statement got translated into a bigger, but simpler version.
<aside> <img src="/icons/verified_green.svg" alt="/icons/verified_green.svg" width="40px" /> Simplification of the mobile website experience at Street Style Store
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In the second week, I was provided with all the internal details of the site; numbers, graphs, conversions, a plethora of data so to say. I figured out there was a lot of data that the e-commerce industry tracks (sigh). I tried comprehending certain data which of course, I won’t be mentioning here, due to certain legalities; but trust me when I say, it was a hell lot of customer information to watch, follow and then design the best of the best user interface for the company’s website.
Moving on with the project, I audited the site quite a number of times that even I do not have count of. Day in and day out for the entire week, I constantly audited for UX bugs and to my surprise, the site was barely up on the internet! It was full of bad UX practices that made me enjoy the audits. Not to demean the time and energy invested in building up the site, but throughout the tenure, it was like a designer’s hive to spot all the bad UX and write multiple pages of reports on the same.