Lead Product Designer - Head of Design
Mar 2023 - Jul 2023
Design, Research, Product
As the head of design and lead designer, I oversaw design, product, and research. I led research efforts and determined the most important product priorities to create a great buying experience, resulting in a conversion rate of over 4-12% for direct-to-consumer (D2C) businesses. This led to a significant increase of over 60% in return on ad spend. My role involved designing for both B2C customers and creating tools for D2C advertisers. Unfortunately, my time in this position was cut short due to financial problems at the startup.
1. Storefront
Instead of a static website, the immersive storefronts are designed for buyers to discover, learn and make informed shopping decisions.
2. Brand dash
Brand tool for direct to consumer brands to manage their ads expenditure and optimize storefront experience specifically tailored for the ad
Hypothesis driven design experimentation
Given this was a startup, the luxury of taking our sweet time to come up with a polished experience was non existent. So, the approach I designed for my team was hypothesis based experimentation. Following is an example of a typical approach.
Problem we were trying to solve in the example is to drive higher conversion rate as the conversion rate had dropped to 0.8% in comparison to the impressions on the storefront. Ideally, this conversion rate should be higher than 3% as per industry average. Here is an example from Figma on options generated with various hypothesis.
Once these ideas were generated, I drove user research to strengthen the loose hypothesis. Finally, one of the options were shipped after which performance analytics were tracked to mesh the qualitative findings from a quantitative pov.
Shaping the company narrative, identifying new opportunities
Prototyping experiences for AI suite:
The base product was alive, driving >60% Return on Ads Spend, but there were still huge gaps between what buyers needed in their shopping journey and what brands could potentially offer.
Here, with my design team, I rolled up my sleeves to learn on the go by understanding the technological innovations in AI, generative intelligence combining that with the known gaps in the commerce graph.
Example: AI generated product quiz powered by GPT. Here I dabbled in prompt engineering.
Example 2: Can auto-optimizations be built in to the storefronts so that brands can provide a customized shopping experience for their customers?
Example 3: What are ways to surface related products to buyers while helping brands achieve a higher Average Order Value (AOV)