ETAL

Overview

ETAL is a high end streetwear clothing brand startup in Berlin, Germany. I had the pleasure of working with them in order to convey their message through themes and designs based on various struggles of the human condition. Their focus is to create multifunctional clothing that is both sustainable and locally sourced.

Important things to consider:

Consumers like transparency like environmental impact and knowing they are making good choices

My role:

UX Designer/Researcher

Main problem:

Great brand story, but the way the website was structured makes it unclear unless they took the time to look around.

Understanding higher end shoppers:

Before starting on designing and sketching, I contacted the people who agreed to speak with me in order to get a better sense of what they think of the brand and website as well as their views on luxury brands. The clothing on ETAL is higher end, so it’s important to convince the consumer they are worth the money and investment when they don’t really know anything about them.

I asked some general questions like:

What is your occupation?
What is your style?
What are you shopping habits?

I also added questions related to luxury brands:

What is your definition of a luxury brand?
Do you currently own any luxury brand items or streetwear brands?
What makes you want to buy from certain brands even if it’s more expensive?

Then I moved on to questions more centered around ETAL:

What kind of brand is this site?
Does this seem like a luxury brand?

Testing What’s Working and What isn’t

By knowing what their backgrounds were and how they view fashion and the brand, I was able to get the context in what they thought worked and what they didn’t think worked.The COO gave me contacts who all were affiliated with the brand to some degree (helping with the logo or being models), so there were biases. On the other hand they still gave me valuable feedback.

Main Takeaways:

All agreed the site wasn’t up to par with explaining what ETAL is : Brand not as transparent as they could have been

I personally do not shop for streetwear brands, so that itself was a new challenge for me.

Potential Competitors

Commes des Garcon

It's hard to tell how to buy things and I still don’t know how to buy things.
There are “direct stores”, so there could be somewhere to buy their products from them.
There may not be an option to buy things directly, but that is not made clear.

Balenciaga

It is a simple design, but because from what I know of their brand, it fits with what they sell even if it ends up blending all together.

There is color added to the ‘add to shopping bag’ button, so the call to action stands out compared to everything else.
Overall, the easiest of the 3 competitors to use even if not that great.

Off-White

Clickable things aren’t that intuitive
The design reminds me of old-school internet, and that could be what they’re going for but could be confusing for certain audiences.
It could be okay because their audience is mainly those in their 20s-30s and styles. Nostalgia of MySpace

My main complaint would have to be the lack of buttons, the text is bigger so it does call the user’s attention, but definitely could be confusing of whether the text is informative or interactive.
It’s easy to try to just click, but it’s still better to know for sure before doing the action.

Sketches

Main features:

Big banner to grab attention and help explain their brand—allows the message and to shine rather than the design of the website itself.
By putting it up and center, the consumer is able to make a judgment of the brand right away rather than having to click around like before.
I also wanted to add in other features of websites I liked, for example adding filtering. Although the brand's 4 items don't really need filtering now, later on it will be useful. I also wanted to utilize interesting overlapping layouts for their photos in order to make things more interesting to the eye.

User Testing

Because their image and overall color scheme was already set, figuring out changes here and there with the structure was more important.

I tested 5 individuals and most were satisfied with how it was structured.
One user brought to my attention that the overlapping of the cart and the product page was a tad confusing for the eye.
After further research, the company that I drew inspiration from also had a fade effect on the product page along with the cart.
That is overall better as that focuses the eye on the cart and away from the rest of the page that is now blurred.

Learnings and Future changes

Learning to work with a brand was fun and challenging as communication needs to be clear. Collaboration is important even if I'm the sole designer. One of the small but bigger challenges was working with the time difference when the brand is in Berlin while I am in Washington. Figuring out when users are free and having them follow up in a timely manner definitely ended up slowing down the process, but didn't make it impossible.Because I am planning to continue working with the brand, I plan to do more testing to get a better perspective if the website is doing what it should be (someone who never has seen the site before). Right now, the structure of the site is geared towards one clothing collection and one campaign, so changing up the navigational structure is needed to accommodate these changes.

Some other potential changes:

Color theme changes depending on the campaign (ex. lighter colors for a happier theme for a campaign).