E-Commerce & Usable Style Features
This past week I’ve been trying to understand how an e-commerce site effectively offers a feature (or multiple features) to help customers shop based on a style or a look. I’m working on a project to create a mock microsite for Bed Bath & Beyond. It will enable a customer to browse based on style and to create shopping lists and budgets for decorating a room or an entire home (which in my case would be a room - heyo studio apartment living!). Initially, I didn’t think it would be quite the undertaking that it has become. My viewpoint was one of a user, one that hadn’t considered how much thought and intention sites like One King’s Lane had put into developing features.
One King’s Lane was an obvious initial research point. While this brand has a slightly different business model and a substantially more wealthy client base than Bed Bath & Beyond, the design of the content is pretty well done. The landing page says a few things to me:
Shopping here is safe - you can return things.
You could easily spend hours browsing different looks that OKL has curated. The image above is a truncated version of the “Events” offered on the home page, with the option to see more Events on another page.
I liked the way the top menu was designed to keep track of my favorites. You can easily see that there’s a number next to the heart icon, and that I have something in my cart. When you hover over either of those, you get more information displayed in a clear way.
Upon scrolling down, there are a few more ways to shop.
You can shop by room or Our Shops, and then you can also shop by category. OKL also establishes itself as a thought leader in the high end home decor industry with their blog and their social media accounts.
I found this helpful for a number of reasons. I’m in the beginning stages of putting my microsite together, and the task of designing something from scratch was overwhelming me with ideas. One King’s Lane does have some differences from Bed Bath & Beyond which will make some parts of their design irrelevant (they have a large number of one-of-a-kind items, for example), but they are extremely effective in letting a customer pick how they want to shop. A challenge I’m seeing now is the one of accounting for budget shoppers. One of Bed Bath & Beyond’s key customers is the college student looking to decorate a dorm room. To them, budget is paramount. Despite this discrepancy in target demographics, taking a look at One King’s Lane has been a helpful starting point for my comparative research.
