01 Background

Key features

• “The Drop”, code name FloJo, is Amazon’s first fast fashion private brand.
• It partners with international influencers to design of-the-moment collections that could release at any moment — and are gone in 30 hours.
• key features:
  • Designed by influencers, curated the whole look
  • Made-on-demand, ready in 2 weeks
  • Available to order for only 30 hours
  • Amazon’s first global launch

My role in the team

UX manager for fashion new initiatives
Manage and coach designers for fashion new initiatives. Presented to VP monthly for review and feedback as UX lead.
Lead the design end to end
Joint the team when PRFAQ just got approval. Designed the both mobile and desktop experience from scratch. Managed the relationship with partner team, marketing team and vendor.
Lead usability research globally
Run the usability study in  Seattle, New York, Germany, Spain and Japan. Iterated and improved the design based on study findings. Shared the learning with Sr. leadership.

02 Goal and Challenges

Target customers for The Drop



The target customers for this program is the young females who love fashion and use social media everyday.

• 18-32 female
• Open Instagram 32+ times a day
• Spends 6 hours per week researching fashion on her phone
• Spends an average of $3K per year on fashion

Design goals


“Create a fun and immersive shopping experience for fashion lover to purchase made-on-demand apparels in a timely manner.”


Main challenges

• The Drop is Brand new idea. No similar program in Amazon.
• Amazon was not popular in fashion industry as a brand.
• The Drop is the first global launch in Amazon retail.
• The launch date target is ambitious while the resource is limited.

03 Information architecture and workflow

In the initial release, FloJo will launch one collection each week, which last 30 hours only. This divides each week into three segments: before release, during release and after release. There are different goals and flows in each use case. The information which we will present to our customers are also different. The below are some workflow diagrams.









04 Concept designs

The below video is an early design concept which I created and presented to our S-Team. FloJo is first global launch in Amazon Retail. In order to kick off such a global program, we need S-Team’s, highest level in Amazon, approval. The Drop is a brand new idea. There is no similar programs in Amazon which we can benchmark. So, I created some early concept designs and made the below video. The goal is to give leadership visual cue the experience in our mind and get high-level alignment, feedback and approval to move forward.






05 Design iterations on key experiences

In project FloJo, we iterated design daily. Once the design concept was approved by VP and senior leadership, we start to work on detailed design. We went through many design iterations. The below lists a few examples.

Walled Garden V.S. mShop experience

The first big design decision we need to make is whether we want to create a Walled Garden experience or re-use the Amazon App (mShop) experience with big green navigation bar. The senior VP decided to make FloJo part of Amazon App based on business reasons. The visual style of other fashion apps which our target customers frequently used is very different. Our VP asked us to create an experience similar to other popular fashion apps. We explored the possible ways to create immersive experience inside Amazon app, so called walled-garden experience. However, after further investigation, I proposed to our VP that we went with Amazon App experience. The key reason is when FloJo sell other brands apparels from 1st party or 3rd party sellers, the walled garden experience will have a big experience gap for our users to navigate between flojo ASINs and other ASINs. The below is the comparison.




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Homepage – 3 days before a release

The below mockups shows a peak of the journey we took during iterating the design for mobile home page in teasing phase, which is from 3 days before a capsule release until the release is officially launched. We used to have a count down timer during this phase. In the usability study, we found out the users may be confused since we also have a count down timer during active release phase, which has totally different meaning. The later designs remove the count down timer. Another key goal we want to achieve is to demonstrate the most important program values. While we landed the main design, we still iterated a lot to improve the program branding and avoid confusion.









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Shop the look

Shop The Look is the most key UX pattern for active release. One of key value proposition is the customers can purchase the whole look in one stop. The below are some design iteratives. The design rationale we chose the final design is to make sure the users can purchase the ASINs using as less click as possible.


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Fun ideas

We have tried a lot of cool ideas. Due to limited resource and aggressive timeline, these design didn’t make the cut to be launched as Minimal Lovable Product. The below show cases the design ideas which will be launched in future.


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06 Brand guidelines

As mentioned before, one of the challenges we have for Flojo project is Amazon didn’t have strong branding in fashion industry. We want to make Flojo experience modern and fashion. So, we created the branding guideline dedicated for The Drop. The below images are a few screenshoots of FloJo’s brand guideline, which covers Brand voice, ID, color, typography and graphics.







07 Usability research

It’s very critical to verify the design ideas with the target users as soon as possible. There are three challenges for this program.

• This is a highly confidential project. We cannot release any project related information with external users.
• We don’t have a dedicated usability researcher.
• This is a global program and we target the users in different countries.
The most important marketplaces for this program is US, Europe and Japan. We run usability lab researches from later 2018 to 2019 in Seattle, New York, Spain, Germany, and Japan. These researches provided valuable data for us to keep improving our experience. The below screenshots are the usability testing we run in Seattle, Japan and Germany.







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08 Result and learning

Results

This program successfully launched on June 5, 2019. We sold more than 10 thousand pieces in 1 day. We also gained tens of thousands of new SMS subscribers and Instagram followers. The feedback from our customers was very positive. Our customer said “One drop in and I’m already addicted to this program.”. The below images show our Instagram posts from our first launch and the positive comments.





Some learnings



Be bold
Be bold to challenge any decision if there is enough data



Think out of box
Don’t get trapped in your own closed mind



Work with partners
Bring everyone in the same table when working with partner teams



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