In 2019, The Wedding Shop team at Shutterfly was tasked with creating a landing page that catered to the customers: Brides.
The purpose of this project was to capture future intent by communicating Shutterfly’s end to end solutions (i.e. Save the Dates all the way through to thank you cards). We also wanted the Shutterfly Weddings category page can be a one-stop shop for all your wedding needs and inspiration.
My Role
This was a major project I worked on as a designer for The Wedding Shop at Shutterfly. I was one of the designers on this project. As a designer I worked on research, ideation, and design for the project. I collaborated with two other designers on this project and presented the proejct to non-designers in three rounds. Working with a team on this project strengthened my ability to communicate with designers and non-designers. I realized this is an important skill for designers and welcomed the opportunity to grow in this way.
ROLE
UX Designer, Visual Designer
TIMELINE & OUTPUT
Responsive web design
2 Month Project
TEAM
Creative Director,
Art Director,
Marketers (5),
Designer,
Web Developer
The Problem
The Wedding Shop has end to end solutions for wedding customers. We needed to show customers how Shutterfly provides wedding solutions throughout every stage of wedding planning.
Research
Who is The Wedding Shop Customer?
The Wedding Shop is a e-commerce wedding business that offers wedding stationery along with other personalized wedding products including wedding albums, and personalized wedding decor.
Primary customer is a bride who wants her wedding to stand out, but who is also budget conscious (wants beautiful designs but at a good price). The bride is someone who cares about the details and wants everything to be beautiful. The average household income for The Wedding Shop (TWS) brides is $48k and they are recently engaged or married. The TWS customer is also a woman between 18-34 years of age which is on the younger side since the average bride is 32 years old.
How can we show that The Wedding Shop has budget friendly solutions for their wedding?
Learning More About How Modern Brides Plan their Wedding
While keeping in mind The Wedding Shop bride, we wanted to search for more information about how brides are planning their wedding. Shutterfly has a partnership with the Knot and Wedding Wire and because of this we got access to some of the studies they have conducted on weddings. Some of the research were interested in was how brides plan a wedding. Wedding Wires 2019 Newlywed Report showed that “While the average couple is engaged for 15 months, over 85% of couples start discussing their wedding preferences—like guest count (63%) and type of venue (57%)—prior to getting engaged.”
We also found that a lot of the planning work is up to the brides and planners aren’t as common as weddings are getting cheaper. With the young age of the TWS customer, paired with their lack of professional planning, we knew that Shutterfly had a real opportunity to inform and inspire the bride.
“Despite being so proactive, couples still say one of their biggest challenges during planning is “knowing where to start” in addition to “planning within budget.”
— Wedding Wire 2019 Newlywed Report
What Does the Research Show?
So now we know who the brides are that are going to the Wedding Shop and how they are planning their wedding. But what do we do with this research? We wanted to pull this research into actionable solutions that we could design upon. Due to the brides lack of planning help we realized we needed to inform the bride as she shopped. Giving her examples and information about wedding plan and how Shutterfly can directly influence and help with solutions to their wedding as they shopped would increase the customer satisfaction and Shutterflys TWS sales.
The Wedding Shop customers need wedding information/inspiration to show how Shutterfly’s products can help in all aspects of their wedding.
Design Solutions that
Inform and Inspire
To find a solution to our problem, my team and I went to work to mockup some possible solutions to how to portray helpful information to brides. We first asked ourselves how we could portray helpful information. Here are a few examples of some of the solutions we came up with.
- How can we help inform brides of important dates in the planning process?
- How can we inform brides on the various stationery options (invitations, suites, etc.) they have at The Wedding Shop?
- How can we inspire brides with TWS products that will help with end to end wedding solutions.
Product Descriptions
One solution we found to make the wedding shoppable but also informative was this tab section where a description of the wedding stationery enclosed in each tab would portray helpful information about the piece of stationery. A large image and example of the stationery on the left would help inspire brides about the Wedding Stationery has to offer. This would be done with all categories that you can see included in the tab.
Sationery Timeline
Another solution we found was creating a Wedding Stationery timeline. One challenge that brides come across when planning a wedding is when to complete certain tasks. There are a lot of unwritten “rules” to sending out the stationery involved with a wedding so we thought a timeline showing the months when an invite or save the date should be completed would help inform the bride whereas a big image of the product related to the time in timeline would help inspire the bride.
Anatomy of a Suite
A third solution to inform the bride was to give an overview of what each part a stationery wedding suite involved. This provided opportunities to up-sell certain parts of the suite including adding foil and custom stamps to the suite.
Wedding Tips
Another idea we had was to incorporate wedding tips into the website. This was a way to portray helpful information to brides as they scroll through the landing page. The tips would be small strips of copy throughout the site so the wouldn’t take up a lot of real estate for other shoppable parts of the website.
The Final Solution
The new Wedding Shop landing page will offer a wedding timeline, anatomy of a suite and helpful tips to help inform brides on wedding planning while showing them the solutions The Wedding Shop has to offer. The final design we came up successfully informed brides with wedding planning tips as well as showing them the wedding solutions that Shutterfly has to offer. What helped in inspiring the bride was the beautiful Shutterfly product photography. We had those images prominent so brides could see how Shutterfly’s products could be viewed in their wedding.
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