🛍 Fabletics Retail

At Fabletics, DTC doesn't just mean eCommerce: with over 74 stores in the US alone, getting in-store technology right is a pillar of the company's strategy. From shopper-facing fitting room apps to in-house sales tools, I've helped push a modern user experience to our retail platforms.

One of my first projects with the team involved updating the interface for our fitting room technology. Each room has two iPad screens: one outside the door for identifying and monitoring in-room items and one inside the room for browsing products and requesting new items.

I started with a few interviews and observation sessions with associates to get a better understanding of how they use the tech themselves and where they see users struggle the most, paired off with our engineers to learn what data and events were available to each screen, and finally spun it all together with a little branding polish. A very iterative project, but it was a hit with our store teams and their regulars.

Click below to see how the legacy and updated UI compares:

Sales tools

There are two tools that make selling easier at a Fabletics location.

The first is the Legging Finder, a self-service app installed on iPads throughout the store. It allows shoppers to answer a few questions about themselves, their needs, and their style, and get a set of personalized product recommendations in return. Today this provides a great jumping off point for shopper education and sales conversations, and in the future it could support a complete self-service checkout experience for guests who prefer that.

I was responsible for designing this app before it hit stores. The deadline was aggressive (a couple of weeks), so my design process was strongly driven by existing knowledge and assumptions. I folded past experience chatting with our store teams and working in retail myself in with some learnings gleaned from iterations on our website quiz, and banged a prototype out. With some small tweaks for scope, the app went live successfully last fall.

The other sales tool is our associate app, which combines inventory and cash management with basic Point Of Sale (POS) functionality on the iPod Touch device associates carry. It works! But it has many of the frustrating drawbacks legacy tools tend to have, from a steep learning curve to straight-up gaps in the feature set. Functionality aside, the UI leaves something to be desired from a positioning perspective, considering retail associates frequently use it side-by-side with shoppers to find products that aren't available in store.

Here are a few key screens from the legacy app:

I launched a redesign effort with the retail group's Director of Product late in 2020 and worked through initial research and design for a planned pilot phase: reimagining our product search and cart creation experience. Discovery included field-wide surveys, interviews with key retail leadership, and a range of workshops with our engineering partners as we sketched out what was, what could be, and what we believed we could pull off in the first pass.

Following ideation, I created a few white label prototypes in order to test core elements of the experience and collected usability data and feedback through Maze (great tool!). It was largely positive, barring a couple points of confusion we were able to resolve through revision. Once the changes were made, we presented up to senior management and got an enthusiastic green light on development.

That was midway through last year. The back half of the year included a number of curveballs on our roadmap that left the initiative on hold, but I was able to use that time to hire another designer onto the retail team and run a series of fresh opportunity surveys and information architecture exercises with team members in the field. Some assumptions were confirmed, some new things were learned, and our concepts came away better for it.

The redesign project is back on the roadmap and we're currently working through an expansion of last year's phase one vision.