The Challenge
Our creative marketing partners aimed to refresh the photography style across our category pages, moving towards a more inspirational, lifestyle-oriented aesthetic. My role was to lead a team in exploring and implementing a repeatable system for this new style, ensuring it could strike a nice balance across our site, and be deployed consistently by multiple teams across the organization.
We identified the key zones to activate with lifestyle images. This change adds warmth and life to the pages while maintaining a system to keep pages from becoming disorganized looking.
Our Approach
Our goal was clear, integrate inspirational lifestyle photography into our shopping pages in a way that enhanced the user experience rather than creating visual clutter. We approached this challenge through an iterative design process, continuously refining our solutions based on robust user feedback and close stakeholder collaboration.
Our process involved:
Exploration and Iteration: We explored several options for incorporating the new photography style, iterating through multiple rounds of design.
Continuous Stakeholder Alignment: We maintained frequent check-ins with stakeholders, ensuring our evolving designs met business objectives and creative vision.
User-Centered Validation: Crucially, each iteration was subjected to customer feedback through a combination of user interviews and online user testing. This direct input was invaluable in understanding how the new photography impacted user perception and navigation.
We went through several rounds trying to capture a system that could work for multiple product categories, and multiple page templates.
The initial plan with details of what types of photography should be used in each section of each page template.
The Outcome
The culmination of this project was a series of comprehensive Confluence documents. These detailed guidelines outlined precisely how each of our various page types should be set up, specifying the appropriate photo styles for every section of every page.
Furthermore, we created supplemental guidelines for photography. These provided specific considerations for our photographers when shooting for numerous smaller page zones that had not historically featured lifestyle imagery. This ensured consistency even in areas that were previously overlooked.
This systematic approach not only successfully introduced a more engaging photography style but also established a scalable framework that empowers teams to maintain a cohesive and inspiring visual experience for our customers.
Proof of concept mockups
Confluence documentation helps ensure all designers can create consistent pages across the site.