Pura Shop Experience
Lead Designer • Launched April 2021
Key Partners: Design, Product Management, Software Development, Marketing
Redesign of pura.com shopping experience, emphasizing conveying scent in a digital experience to simplify the product comparison and find a product that best fits the user's fragrance preferences. Resulted in a 50%+ improvement in conversion rate.
Background
pura.com was initially created using a Shopify template and page builder and didn’t have strong usability backed by user feedback and testing. The company had outgrown a one-size-fits-all website template, and a new design became necessary that made the shopping experience easier for customers to make selections based on their preferences, despite being unable to smell the fragrance products.
Conflict
Beyond mapping the primary user journey, I had the unique challenge of conveying scent in a digital experience. This also prioritized making product recommendations available across the shop experience since users are less sure about what they want without smelling the physical product.
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With Pura being a fast-growing start-up, the process was scrappy. When I joined the project, little user research was done, and the team mainly ran off assumptions rather than factual data and user feedback. We also had a tight turnaround because we continued to miss out on many opportunities with the limited capabilities of the old website.
Solution
I began mapping the user journey to determine user needs and the most significant issues users might encounter while shopping. The map results decided that the most critical issue would be decision-making since fragrance is a product that users cannot experience digitally in any way. We determined that a potential solution for this would be prioritizing recommendations, which was common feedback we received from customers.
User Journey - Shop Experience
I worked toward creating an experience that utilized shared preferences, such as general scent types and common and recognizable ingredients, shifting the focus away from more arbitrary details, such as fragrance and brand names. For example, this made it easier for users to quickly and effortlessly recognize that Pura’s most popular scent, “Volcano,” smells like citrus and vanilla, not a literal volcano.
The feedback among users was positive; they liked the enhanced scent visualization across the website to help them determine what best fit their preferences. In addition, some users appreciated the options to filter products by mood and intensity, scent type, and brand. Still, others were more skeptical and felt those options might be too subjective to be used as accurate filters. Ultimately we decided to keep the filters under the assumption that filter usage would vary based on the level of trust regardless.
Desktop Wireframes
Desktop Prototype - Shop Flow
Mobile Flow Screens
Outcome
The website redesign results were overwhelmingly positive, with an improvement in conversion rate by over 50%. Impacts included improved product education for both the diffuser and individual fragrances, and the checkout process was faster and allowed for an easier toggle between one-time purchases and subscriptions.