ROAM JOURNAL
Roam Studio is a thriving small business clothing company with strong consumer base. They've branched out from vintage into designing their own line of clothing. To help support their growth, they wanted to launch a journal to profile people that wear their clothes and closely match their brand's ethos.
Research
The Problem
Building a journal site that is unique and captures Roam's aesthetic without retreading ideas used by other competitors.
It's important to understand how similar clothing brands craft their digital journal presence, exploring everything from website aesthetics and user interface design to the seamless integration of e-commerce functionalities.
Competitive Analysis
Employing a user-centric approach, the analysis involved in-depth navigation through a number of clothing brands that share a similar aesthetic and target a similar consumer base. Once this was done I was able to identify commonalities between their journal sites.
Visual First Approach
Most of the sites had a heavy emphasis on the imagery that was used. While the sites were publishing written pieces, the hero images were always a focal point of the designs.
Main Takeaways
What's Important
The information that's important to a brand's journal site. This includes an easy to read template (Q&A), what clothes the subject is wearing, and who contributed to the piece were vital pieces of info.
It's Not Just About Sales
While the end goal of consumers visiting the sites was to boost brand awareness and garner sales, the journals weren't overly pushy about making sales. They gave users the option without overdoing it.
Design
Concept Sketching
I began the design process with exploratory sketches. The sketches focused on visuals/imagery that would highlight both the subject of the piece as well as the clothing. For the written piece of the journal the words take up less real estate than the imagery but are sectioned off.
Previous Entries
Title
Intro paragraph
Title
Date
Author
Full Journal
Questions
Answers
Q&A
Quote from later in the journal
Image w/ Quote
Wireframes
From my solution sketches I developed greyscale mid-fidelity wireframes. Once these were fined tuned, brand colors were injected into the design and imagery was added before presenting to the client for notes.
MidFi
Built out basic wireframes based on initial sketches
HiFi v1
Injected brand colors & imagery
Delivery
Final HiFi Design
After rounds of notes and discussions we settled on a final design that fit the brand's aesthetic while captured the initial ideas from concept sketching. While the overall design is similar to the initial concept there are several subtractions and additions to enhance the user experience and highlight information that the brand deemed most important. This also took into account paint points identified by competitor's sites to avoid alienating consumers.
Notes & Adjustments:
- After discussion, we simplified the information on the title page to simplify what the users were seeing
- It was a major sticking point for the brand to have the name of the photographer on the title page for attribution; we joined that with the author of the article as well
Notes & Adjustments:
- A "Shop the Look" button was added at the end of the page for users to easily go to the store to shop after the article
- This was purposely placed only once on the entire page and at the end of the article as to not make the consumer feel as though it's all a sales pitch
Notes & Adjustments:
- Tags were placed at the bottom right corner of each image to tell the users what pieces in the photos were the brands
- Each image was made clickable, so one click on the image would take them to the item page to view more about the product