Freeman ecommerce
integration
Optimizing the existing Freeman website to host E-commerce features and designing a new innovation to increase site activity.
Optimizing the existing Freeman website to host E-commerce features and designing a new innovation to increase site activity.
MS UX & Interaction Design
IDD-510: Essentials of Interaction Design Term Project
Solo Project, UX Designer/Researcher
Jan. 3rd, 2022 - Apr. 30th, 2022
17 weeks
Adobe XD, Miro, Google Forms, Confluence
Freeman Beauty is an American skin care products company. Founded in 1976 in Los Angeles, CACurrently, Freeman relies on partnerships with retailers that provide customers their products to users in their respective markets, ranging from larger global box stores(Target, Walmart) as well as international e-commerce retailers. With no exclusive e-commerce solution of their own, they find themselves in a situation where their sales are limited to the success or failure of their retail partners.
Integrate a foundational e-commerce system into the existing Freeman website as well as relevant innovations to increase activity to the new site.
Freeman Beauty’s existing sales model is built around retail partnerships that they use to sell their products, with no exclusive e-commerce platform of their own to create strong D2C channels. Implementing the basic requirements needed in order to successfully add an e-commerce solution to Freemans’ website was simple enough; there are set features that every e-commerce website requires in order to be effective on paper. The real goal is getting users to prefer the e-commerce experience on the Freeman site, thus persuading them to shift from existing retailers sites towards the Freeman site.
Freeman Beauty’s existing sales model is built around retail partnerships that they use to sell their products, with no exclusive e-commerce platform of their own to create strong D2C channels. Implementing the basic requirements needed in order to successfully add an e-commerce solution to Freemans’ website was simple enough; there are set features that every e-commerce website requires in order to be effective on paper. The real goal is getting users to prefer the e-commerce experience on the Freeman site, thus persuading them to shift from existing retailers sites towards the Freeman site.
Freeman Beauty’s existing sales model is built around retail partnerships that they use to sell their products, with no exclusive e-commerce platform of their own to create strong D2C channels. Implementing the basic requirements needed in order to successfully add an e-commerce solution to Freemans’ website was simple enough; there are set features that every e-commerce website requires in order to be effective on paper. The real goal is getting users to prefer the e-commerce experience on the Freeman site, thus persuading them to shift from existing retailers sites towards the Freeman site.
The secondary issues that presented itself came with the layout design. the app was designed as a grid of information for users to access in order to gain insights to UW's various fitness services, however by doing this it has resulted in a fragmented application that does not promote users to build natural flows within the app and navigate naturally.
In addition, the links to various content on the app leads in to individual browsers only worked to further amplify the fragmentation within the application. The new solution needed to address in order to ensure that users would desire to use the application more frequently.
After my research was complete, I was able to create consolidated user profile based on the target user for this project. This profile would be crucial in making sure that I was creating a solution that could be statically backed by the users challenges, goal and needs.
Implementing the basic requirements needed in order to successfully add an e-commerce solution to Freemans’ website was simple enough; there are set features that every e-commerce website requires in order to be effective on paper. The real goal is getting users to prefer the e-commerce experience on the Freeman site, thus persuading them to shift from existing retailers sites towards the Freeman site.
The primary issues students had with the existing application was the lack of integrated schedule management to work around their school schedules. There was a need for a quick schedule management and booking features that easily integrated the existing LEARN system that UWÂ used.
It was clear that focusing on creating a solution that was able to create its own self-hosted library of information within the app and making sure that an effective schedule management system was integrated at the forefront of the new solution.
After doing some research into industry standards and similar solutionsthere were a few ideas that had been generated  as potential candidates based on inisights from my interviews, so I used to MoSCow methods to effectively sort the ideas based on their feasibility , eventually allowing me to choose my idea.
I used the MoSCow method to determine which features should be integrated into each interface upgrade. For the loyalty rewards integration I wanted to ensure that the user had the correct motivation to maximize their usage of this feature, so understanding the right level of content and offers for a primary integration was crucial in creating an efficient SaaS integration.
For my bundle innovation, the primary objective was to create an innovation that felt comfortable to the user and wasn't foreign to their experience using similar solution on other sites. The initial design was kept complex enough to get users the ability to customize and create bundles that fit their preferences, but also didn’t become too confusing and alienate them from the innovation.
After narrowing down on the final structure of my wireframes the next step was to find a place for the integrations to live. While it would have been easy to slap both innovations, it was also important to slide the integrations effectively into to site so that the user wont feel pressured on entrance and their experience is more natural By creating a sitemap, I was able to showcase the location for both integration, which is something that would also better help developers if this were to be developed.
The wire-framing process was split into two wireframes sets. The innovation wireframes had some feedback therefore required a second iteration of wireframes. In the case of the SaaS Integration wireframes, because the integration had much more defined requirements, so the wireframes didn't not have much variation.
The Freeman Beauty Loyalty Rewards Programs is a simple SaaS integration which can be done using sites such as which will allow users to accumulate points which can be redeemed later for offers and deals including but not limited to: offers for money off future purchases, free products, early product access, etc.
My innovation integration is the Freeman Bundle Builder, a new way for users to create customized product bundles  that can be made up of the products that they want and aren’t bound by existing pre-packaged bundles which leave the user with many unwanted and wasted skincare products.
