Style Visual Filters for FIGS
As part of a New Customer initiative, our upper funnel e-commerce team was tasked with improving our on-site visual filters to improve user understanding of the differences between styles we offer within categories.
Role
Lead UI / UX designer
Touchpoints
E-commerce upper funnel, product list page
Timeline
3 weeks
The Problem
The existing visual filter experience on the FIGS product list page was designed for category filtering or navigation and not for enabling users to compare different styles within a category, both from a visual perspective or by using descriptive copy to guide users. As part of a New Customer Initiative, it was paramount that we update these filters to allow new users who might not be familiar with different silhouettes and product styles to more easily compare these products within a collection.
Goals
Update the visual filter experience to allow new and existing customers to easily compare product styles at a glance without needing to click into product pages for more details.
Discovery & Design
Competitive Patterning
To begin fueling design decisions, competitive patterning was conducted to look at brands that utilized visual filter experiences similar to the idea we were hoping to implement. Unsurprisingly, these came mostly from brands that had a strong denim presence, where visually separating styles was paramount for user choice making. We were influenced most by Everlane and Madewell for their design decisions around synthesizing strong visuals against short, but descriptive, copy.
Data Collection
According to our site survey, approximately 33.6% of participants find our product information to be "fairly clear" rather than "very clear," and about 4.3% find it "not clear." We suspect that new customers, in particular, may struggle to navigate and distinguish between styles and fabrics efficiently. The primary source of confusion appears to be our scrub pants collections.
Design Concepting
From our competitive patterning findings, we largely understood from the onset what design direction we wanted our solution to follow, so during concepting, we focused mainly on how the differences in asset choice, copy layout, and image size and resolution affected the UX overall, being mindful as well of any responsive screen size accommodations.
Final Ideation
Collaborating with our partners on the Brand and Copywriting teams, we aligned on using “ghost” imagery to properly show the differences in silhouette styles, use minimal but descriptive copy, and add an “intro card” that gave more information about the core styles the user was viewing.
Testing & Results
Before AB testing our visual filter solution, we conducted moderated User Interviews, including Usability Testing, to gather initial feedback around the efficacy of the updated filter designs against the existing designs. What we learned and what our key takeaways were are as follows:
New visual filter designs are an improvement
The customers shown the the new designs preferred it in direct comparison to the existing designs.
Unfamiliarity with Core Styles
All interviewed customers were not familiar with the concept of Core Styles and often miss-associated the term with Core colors, validating the inclusion of the “intro card” that explains Core as a concept for styles.
Existing visual filters fail to capture
All customers responded that they did not use nor necessarily know the current filters were interactive. All thought they were not especially helpful.
Customers are familiar with style names for products they know well or own multiple of
But customers spoke confusingly about the differences between styles, validating the need for these design updates.
AB Test Results
Upon successful completion and validation gained from user interviews, our product team launched an AB test comparing the new, updated variant against the existing control to full traffic on the Women’s Scrub Pants collection.
We observed +4% CVR, +2% AOV, and +6% RPV in the updated visual filter experience.
The variant drove +8% of total filter engagement than control.
Small improvement in # of PDP Views before ATB (-2% for repeat).
Rollout
After a successful launch using our Women’s Scrub Pants core style collection, we rolled out the updated visual filter designs for our remaining core style collections to include Men’s Scrub Pants, and Women’s and Men’s Scrub Tops.
Project Challenges
From a design perspective, the team largely experienced no incredible hurdles throughout the design and implementation process. When there was friction, it related to what assets were best to use for the visual filter imagery. We moved through using CAD imagery and on-model imagery, before finally moving to use the “ghost” assets shown in the final designs, and came to this decision through close collaboration with our Brand team and product managers.
From a Brand perspective, it made more sense to use on-model imagery, but this imagery was not always consistent in giving clear views of the differences between product styles. Together, we were able to align on the best “ghost” imagery to use, which allowed us to highlight visual differences as a goal of the project.