Product & Design Leadership | Human-Centred Experiences | AI Strategy
LoveCrafts (formerly Love Knitting) 2015
From e-Comm to Community Platform
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The Product
Loveknitting is a very succesful EComm crafting provisions site that, when I joined the team, had outgrown its legacy Magento E Comm platform and was making the leap into converting to a bespoke framework and expanding to incorporate a social platform.
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My Role
As Product Design Director I was tasked with:
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leading the team that delivered the user experience solution of a social and community element into loveknitting.com.
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managing the design delivery for the responsive web solution
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managing the complete visual redesign.
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I also led the concept phase for the Loveknitting app and for new features of the core product.
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I hired and managed a team of 1 x visual and 3 x UX Designers.
Workshopping and process planning
The Approach
A significant portion of the work to be done had already been defined by the product managers before I arrived at the project, and was collated in the form of user stories, so working in sync with the product managers and CTO, I defined a design schedule that would allow us to work efficiently to deliver the UX solution to the development team, quickly and concisely and within their established agile methodology
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User Experience Design
Juggling multiple objectives and requirements was tricky. Our design documents needed to be very comprehensive so were collated in epics of themed user stories. They detailed user flows and high fidelity wireframes, interaction design specifications and also covered the responsive solution in their entirety.
The team worked collaboratively with the developers, presenting work at daily UX stand ups and reviewing output regularly.
User flows, Interface designs, taxonomy, interaction specification and resposive web mark up examples from the UX handover
Visual Design
The Visual Design team and I worked with the Business owners and the development team to define the goals and parameters for the visual redesign. The objective was to create a more contemporary look and feel but one that was easily achievable within the existing framework.
The Visual redesign was delivered in tandem with the User Experience Design, and took the form of a guidelines document to be applied to the high fidelity wireframes being supplied by the UX team.
Pages from the Visual Design mark up document
End Result
The new loveknitting site was launched mid 2015 and the company continues to go from strength to strength. In November 2015 they received an additional $20m series B funding, bringing their total funding to $30m. Site visits have increased by 50% in a year. The site won 3rd place in the best website category at the British Knitting Awards – a great achievement for a company that is only 3 years old in an incredibly competitive industry.
Pages from the final product. You can visit the companies websites here: www.loveknitting.com www.lovecrafts.com