As the URBN brand looked into the competitive landscape of e-commerce, there was a desire for a convergence between all of the child brands. The effort was to bring Free People, Urban Outfitters, Anthropologie and BHLDN into one shared code repository, and each brand’s voice would be shown through different themes. This is what’s known as theming from a design system in today’s design and engineering landscape.
I was the Art Director for the Free People “replatforming.” I mentored our graphic design team, who at the time handled catalog and print imagery, in compression and file-size standards for web. Direct lines of communication with our leadership and stakeholders led to this project being successful and seeing a massive 50% spike in traffic to our product pages. Beyond my design contributions and process, I was fortunate enough to contribute dev-ready front-end HTML and CSS.
Our platform goal was to enrich our product browsing and checkout experience. At the top of everyone’s mind was page performance. Our initial findings revealed an average of 30MB+ resource load, with some of the heavier pages topping 60MB. We found this was the same from desktop to mobile. Imagine our customer on the go wanting to browse some new clothes, but her page takes ages to load, and we lose potential conversion due to desktop size assets being used on a mobile experience.
I led the charge in enhancing our processes. The first step was reducing file sizes across our image assets. I provided templates and standards for how images should be exported from Photoshop. I also mentored the team on how to approach our assets from a mobile-first approach, to see if there was potential for assets that were used in our mobile space to be used in the tablet space. This would result in proper assets sized to the various screen sizes we served.
Next was streamlining our cart and checkout experience. In the e-commerce space, a split second can be the difference between conversion or cart abandonment. We reduced the amount of required form fields, and remapped the checkout journey. She would have the opportunity to provide shipping and billing details, review the order, and checkout. Along this journey she could log into her account at any time, but we never asked to create an account until post-transaction. Removing this interruption resulted in a noticeable spike in conversion and account creations, with major gains week-over-week within the first two months of launch.
In the end we saw massive gains for the Free People site, alongside templates and standards that would apply to all of our sibling brands as this was expanded.
66% faster page load speeds.
50% page size reduction.
50% increased traffic to product pages.
Conversion rate week-over-week increased for first two months.
