James Avery is a national jewelry brand focused on creating heirloom quality artisan jewelry. Their brand features a large multi-generational following familiar with purchasing in-store.
In oder to stay competitive, the brand decided to invest in digital innovation.
This six month project addressed the following: moving from a legacy platform to Salesforce, revamping taxonomy, updating in-store kiosks, a complete redesign, and overhauling the custom jewelry builder tool.
As the UX functional lead, my role covered a variety of cross-department responsibilities including:
The project kicked off with an in-depth discovery process geared towards uncovering user requirements and defining MVP work. Discovery took place over four weeks with IT, UX, and Site Merchandising.
Congruently, I began the research phase auditing existing digital experiences in-store, via email, and on site. The second half focused on competitor analysis and best practices.
Creating documentation was a pivotal part of the research process. The granular reports showed data in a variety of ways ensuring all stakeholders found the information useful.
The visuals captured in the Competitor Analysis served as a valuable reference doc when developing UI with the Product teams.
Top Research Findings
Explore Reports
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James Avery Homepage - Before
As the UX Strategist my tasks included serving a Core Team Member responsible for major project decisions, external resource management, and reporting progress to Executive Leadership.
Along with the steering committee duties, I also:
The end-to-end design process took three months and fed directly in to the dev sprints. My responsibility was to manage the complete process.
Design System Development
James Avery had an existing brand guide focused on print and brand voice. The digital experience was not defined or documented. After several cross-department workshops with Branding, Creative, the CPO, and Site Merchandising I was able to translate the static elements into digital design system.
This Included:
High-Fidelity Deliverables
As functional lead it was my responsibility to design the wireframes for all templates, layouts, components, and modules on the new site.
It was vital to hold several stakeholder demos for each area of the site to guarantee all business use cases were accounted for.
Wireframes Included:
UX Resource Management
Once I had established the design perspective with the styleguide and main wireframes, the UX team took over the remaining work needed to create granular use case mocks and dev notes for IT.
During this period, I pivoted to managing the team workload, hosting design reviews, synthesizing stakeholder feedback, and overseeing IT as they began to implement the designs.
"Create Your Own" Tool
In tandem to managing the UX team during the second half of the design phase I led the complete transformation of the "Create Your Own" tool. The existing tool allowed users to personalize bracelets and charms.
Although the visual layout was impacted by the redesign, the success of this project really relied on developing quality architecture and well defined user flows.
This was my favorite project to date because it was a combination of all my skills including UX, Development, Information Architecture, and Design
As the dev sprints began I was able to start focusing on all things code.
A largest portion of time during development was spent QAing the code and providing pixel by pixel feedback.
Work Included:
One of the last steps was moving all products and content over to the new site.
To allow the web designer more autonomy while creating new modules, I decided on implementing Bootstrap during the migration. This required me to recode all static landing pages prior to moving to SFCC.
The Process to Migrate Included:
The new James Avery website successfully launched in time for the holiday rush. From redesign to new functionality I am truly excited to see the user response.
Personally I enjoyed being able to interact and collaborate with every aspect of the business. It is very rewarding to see the team's hard work come to life.
