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PARTYCITY.com Personalized plates, napkins & cups
PartyCity.com began offering their customers various products with the option to customize them. I created a mobile-focused experience as well as a desktop experience, that allows the user to personalize plates, napkins or cups with their own artwork or artwork from a pre-made gallery supplied by Party City. I began the project by detailing out the user-flow required for the best user experience. Afterwards, I created wireframes of how the experience was going to be laid out with the multiple personalization options on the various devices. Once the wireframes were approved by the stakeholders, the design process began and a prototype was created and ready to be passed off to development.
What was I trying to solve?
Incorporate a user-friendly tool for the customer to customize directly on the PDP
Cross merchandise personalized and non-personalized items so the customer doesn’t have to dig to find personalization
Incorporate a gallery of options
Allow customer to upload their own artwork
Allow customer to be able to choose between one color or full color since there are pricing differences
Allow customer to pick colors and have a preview of their design as they build it
Increase overall sales for personalized products
Incorporate end-to-end experience for personalized products
RESEARCH: COMPETITOR RESEARCH
At PartyCity.com, I start all projects by looking at our competitors and analyzing all the functionality as well as user interface to make sure the experience that will be created will be industry-standard, or better. I look at areas of improvement and ways to make the Party City experiences stand out from the rest of the competition. I want all of the experiences I create to be user friendly and aesthetically pleasing so the customer wants to come back and shop. From this research, I’m able to compile a list of recommendations that should be included in the final product. Even though this particular experience had many touch points throughout the site and many products that a variation of this experience would apply to, there were some elements that were required across each user journey.
Header should be moved to top of page rather than in the middle, should be consistent with rest of site
When there’s areas for the customer to customize, have default text say “Customize Text” and require the fields to be interacted with so the customer doesn’t accidentally order an incorrect item
Simplify the call to actions and remove what’s not needed - original iteration had an unnecessary button to show the same image in a different browser tab which could frustrate the customers
Minimize confusion for customer and allow customer to personalize directly within the PDP
Need to give font previews because customers don’t know off-hand what fonts look like and shouldn’t have to click on each to find out
Incorporate info buttons next to each customizable attribute so customers can have any questions answered without getting frustrated and leaving the site
To simplify the “Upload Your Image” and reduce clicks for user, put image specifications in below “Upload Your Image” text and when you click the section, it’ll go directly to your device photos rather than an interim pop up with details
Functionality:
Personalization for napkins, cups and plates
Ability to personalize straight from product description page
Ability to upload custom artwork or choose from gallery options
