Brief

As the E-commerce Growth Manager at Cardon, I spearheaded the brand’s first comprehensive website overhaul to beautify and optimize the user experience and back-end processes of the entire e-commerce ecosystem. This case study will showcase key project areas where I contributed the most value in redesigning the brand’s website.

What does an integrated e-commerce solution look like for a men’s personal care brand?

About the Brand

Cardon is a direct-to-consumer men’s personal care brand known for its science-backed formulations using innovative Korean skincare technology. The brand focuses on creating simple and effective skincare solutions tailored to the specific needs of men's skin.

My Contributions

This project required end-to-end management from initial goal-setting and discovery to overseeing branding, content production, design, implementation, migrations, and post-launch maintenance of the entire e-commerce ecosystem. I was also heavily involved in ideating and resolving design and technical challenges throughout the design and development process. This project case study is organized based on my personal contributions:

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Disclaimer: High-fidelity wireframe designs displayed in this case study were created by a third-party agency.

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Understanding the Problem

Before I joined the company, the brand’s former website experienced barriers in user experience and technical issues. The internal team was also doing a lot of manual work managing the website’s backend due to an overflowing tech stack and disjointed processes. 

To solve these problems, I worked closely with a design and development agency to explore and execute a comprehensive e-commerce solution that would meet both business and user needs.

Project Scope

We decided to completely revamp the e-commerce experience, from revisiting brand strategy and messaging to optimizing the product discovery experience. We also aimed to streamline website backend processes by building a fluid content management system (CMS) and cleaning up unnecessary applications.

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The primary business goals we defined were as follows:

Initial Discovery & User Research

Before onboarding with the design and development agency, I facilitated a series of exploration sessions with the internal team to build a backlog of requirements. Through these sessions, I found that the team didn’t have a clear picture of the “why, how, and where” of user pain points they wanted to address.

I decided to conduct preliminary user research and ran usability tests to gain a better understanding of user pain points across primary website touchpoints. I designed two types of usability tests for both new and returning customers: a website first impressions test and a subscription journey test.

Here were some key takeaways from the two tests:

Synthesizing the Results 

I ran an affinity mapping exercise to map our initial business requirements to the user pain points we discovered. This helped us identify key areas of the website where we wanted to focus our UX optimization efforts.

Revisiting the Brand Identity

We conducted a brand audit to refresh the brand voice, messaging, and information hierarchy. The goal was to provide a clear and cohesive brand value proposition across key touchpoints on the new website. We also updated the brand style guide for the new website and handed this off to the design agency for reference.

Design Reviews

I supervised the design review sessions and created a robust feedback and documentation process. With my UX background, I also contributed my ideas and solutions to design and technical challenges. To give you an idea of the range of solutions I contributed to the design review process, below are three different examples where I helped improve the navigation and product discovery experience.

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Refreshing the Content

I collaborated with a content production agency to develop new photo and video assets for the website. I managed the planning and creative direction for both photo and video shoots, from developing creative briefs and product instruction storyboards to building out comprehensive shot lists - we had a lot of shooting to do!

Implementation & Migrations

During the website development process, I conducted iterative user acceptance testing (UAT) and managed the bug-tracking process. I built a UAT plan and ran the tests, recorded the results, and worked with the development team to address bugs/issues.

The biggest challenge during implementation and testing was managing several additional backend integrations and migrations. For example, we needed to integrate 20+ new website applications and migrate to a new domain. I created an agile implementation strategy, splitting the new integrations and migrations into five phases.

Other Work

We were a small startup team so managing a large-scale project like this entailed working on multiple projects simultaneously, and fast. Below is a list of additional contributions I made:

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Next Steps & Learnings

We successfully launched the brand’s new e-commerce store, resulting in an over 50% increase in onsite AOV and an over 5% increase in new subscription rates in less than four months. We also saw a significant decrease in customer complaints. Seeing positive results right away after a major website overhaul is usually difficult to achieve, especially with a domain migration, but we did it!

🔗 CHECK IT OUT

A few things I learned:

• user research is the key to prioritization
• pivot when necessary
• listen to the experts (in this case, the design agency!)