How The Very Group Puts Its Customers First Via User Experience Design
All images courtesy of The Very Group.
The retail industry is competitive. To keep pace with our competitors, we need to exceed our customers’ constantly evolving expectations.
Never has this been more true than during the coronavirus outbreak. As one of the UK’s largest online retailers, our customers are relying on us.
It’s crucial to get our digital messaging just right. We’ve always strived to create the best user experiences for shoppers, which seamlessly translates across all digital channels and devices.
We want our communications to be empathic and they have to relate to customers on a personal level to be effective.
We’ve reflected everyday customer challenges in our content, curating unique shopping experiences that are useful and relevant, such as:
Our attentiveness to our customers informs our UX design process too and we believe we need to do three things really well for our customers:
- Understand our customers’ user experience challenges.
- Come up with solutions and validate our designs via user testing.
- Put our designs live to give customers the products they need.
To do all this seamlessly, our team relies on Adobe Creative Cloud and Adobe XD.
Why Creative Cloud and XD are game changers
We keep our design patterns, components, photographic assets and logos within Creative Cloud, which has allowed us to switch to remote working with ease.
Our design system is an Adobe XD document that’s shared across the design teams via the cloud, so we’re always confident that designers have all the latest versions of the assets they need. Any change we make pushes to the latest versions across all designers in real-time. XD allows our teams to design at scale, react efficiently and prototype user journeys for key stakeholders via one link.
One of our prototypes in XD.
Once everything’s approved, we hand off the work to developers, so they can access all the information they need to build out the content. This includes sizes, colors and the ability to extract the images from the link provided. This has helped us increase efficiency when building digital experiences and subsequently reduce rework.
The transition to XD
Before we started using XD exclusively for our design flows, we were using Sketch. Making the move to XD has empowered us to keep design moving, meet our business goals and serve our customers better than ever during this pandemic.
We love that everyone works together on one, shared platform. This solved the previous incompatibility challenges we were experiencing. Now, we’re able to easily share assets and proven design patterns from UX designers with the creative teams. To say this has come in handy now is an understatement.
XD makes it easy to share weblinks for review and development. This has enabled our creative teams to design, prototype, and share the experiences we create for signoff with our stakeholders.
Feedback is then delivered back to designers in real time by using the commenting feature within XD. Thanks to Coediting, designers can collaborate more effectively by inviting other designers and simultaneously editing in the same document.
Finally, as a mobile-first retailer, to immediately see the content we create on a mobile device is invaluable, given that more than 75 percent of all the traffic to our brands comes from mobile.
Our The mobile-first approach leads to content-focused and user-focused designs.
How our video content is also supporting customers
Recently, the majority of our content has been for both social and brand, primarily as customer-facing responses to the pandemic. All of our content is made using Adobe Premiere Pro and Adobe After Effects.
While our video workflows have stayed consistent without any significant changes, we are seeing more content that’s user-generated. This has led to some formatting issues for certain channels, like vertical video that we have to transfer into horizontal (16:9) formats. To fill these formats, we like to duplicate and blur in Premiere Pro.
Another tool we’ve been using to help with these campaigns is Adobe Rush. The beauty of Rush is that it empowers some of the designers on our team with no prior video-editing experience to efficiently edit videos. Because of this, they’re able to create valuable content for the different channels of some of the big brands we work with.
Watch this 20-second clip on how The Very Group is using Rush.
Build lasting customer relationships
We’ve found that addressing the creative and operational challenges posed by the pandemic head-on has allowed us to continue serving our customers in the right way. Via relevant content, UX focused on our customers’ needs, and videos that inspire, we believe we are answering this challenge.
For more information about The Very Group’s approach to design, check out this short video.
Watch this 2-minute video about The Very Group’s design approach.
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