Aéropostale

2021

Agency:

Astound Commerce

Team:

3 People -

Sr. UX designer (me)

UX designer

Sr. UI designer

About Aéropostale:

Aéropostale is a specialty retailer of high-quality denim and fashion basics offered at compelling values in an innovative and exciting store environment.

Engagement Description:

Aéropostale came to Astound in 2022 for a site redesign.

Overview

Aeropostle was an fun and interesting project to work on due to how they wanted the latest ecommerce trends mixed with fun and new patterns seen on Tiktok or other social media apps. This was due to their main demographic being so young and mobile focused. Also being a discount focused brand they wanted many ways, new and old, to showcase their promotions across the site.

Key points and goals

Create a seamless, modern, and fresh shopping experience that increases customer engagement and maintains brand loyalty for the Aeropostale site.
Leverage best-in-class designs that prioritize intuitive usage and conversion, while employing engaging content and product storytelling that is lacking on the site today.
Design for the Aeropostale customer, but keep in mind ways in which our designs might apply to, or benefit, other SPARC brands.
Observe site performance post-launch; identify the key successful design components that can be carried over into a reference architecture for multiple SPARC brands.

Design Workshop

Because of the upcoming holiday season, the order of how we tackled pages was different than how they’re typically done as a request from a client. Focusing on the PLP and PDP sooner rather than later.

Workshop 1

Product Listing Page, Filters, Search Results.

Workshop 2

Product Details Page.

Workshop 3

Taxonomy and Navigation, Search Interface, Global header and Footer.

Workshop 4

CMS system and Content based pages (Home, Cat Landing, etc)

Each workshop covered the following:

Heuristics Assessment

Review current online experience, and compare to industry standards and established best practices, and identify opportunities for improvement.

Competitive Landscape & Inspiration

While not quite a traditional “competitive landscape” review, we took a look-around at other brands inside and outside the vertical, comparing other experiences, analyzing industry trends, inspiration, etc.

Solution Modeling

Explored and discuss potential design solutions for Aeropostale concepts in a variety of ways, from best-in-class example references, to rapid UX “sketching sessions”, in order to align on solutions and scope.

Workshop 1 - Product Listing Page, Filters, Search Results.

We divided the PLP exploration into three main areas of focus:

Filter & Sort
Grid Layout & Tiles
Search Results

Below are examples taken from just the Filter & Sort section of the PLP workshop deck.

Current Experience Analysis

We provided a breakdown of what we thought was currently working well on their site as well as areas and opportunities for improvement.

Inspiration Examples

Inspirational examples not only showed what was being done from a competitive standpoint but also allowed us to explain the how and why these examples displayed great UX

Experience design explorations

The following screens were designed mobile first, for a screen size of 375x667.

Product Listing Page

Product Detail Page

Image gallery examples

Do to the wide range of the number of images Aero had for it’s products it was important to define a system could accommodate a range of images that wouldn’t leave them feeling not suited to the space.