THE CONTEXT —

Society6 is one of the originators of the concept of artist-driven online marketplaces — it was created to give artists a place to sell their art, and to give customers access to the best designs.

With an all-encompassing engagement that included user research, content strategy & strategic roadmapping, UX Design, UI Design and complex IA and user flows, Pattern and Society6 worked hand in hand for over a year to rethink the entire ecommerce and marketplace experience for both customers and artists.

A replatform to Shopify Plus provided the backend foundation and front end composability to bring this rich, immersive experience to life at scale.

"Working with Pattern was truly a dream. We initially engaged them to lead the redesign for our website, but ended up with a thoughtful and strategic partnership that extended beyond just new UX/UI for our site. From the start, they led with research, using what background we were able to provide and expanding upon it to deliver a comprehensive research project with clearly defined problems and challenges, and strategic and meaningful design solutions. Every step of the project tied back to the research, including expanding our personas, refining our values, and layering in pulses of focus groups and user testing throughout the project."

Brit Tucker
VP, Head of Product and eCommerce
Society6

KEY GOALS AND OBJECTIVES —

01. Improve key business metrics in the areas of increased engagement and conversion rates and performance of returning users
After running on an open-source homegrown platform since 2009, both the Society6 site and its brand had been held back by lack of flexibility and high costs for change. This was having a direct financial impact on the performance of the business, customer perception of the quality of the product, and even the percieved value of the brand.

02. Create opportunities for deeper brand and product storytelling, innovation and customer engagement
While internally priding itself on being an artist-centered platform, this critical aspect of the Society6 experience was being drowned out. Our user interviews confirmed customer's confusion with a shopping experience that wasn't inspirational and offered little guidance, while artists questioned the value of investing time into setting up their storefronts and uploading their artwork. Solving this problem required an entirely new approach to user engagement in the service of both the customer and artist sides of the equation.

03. Craft a compelling and elevated design experience that will serve as a framework to scale and meet future growth goals
As our research and strategy phase took shape, we were able to create and align on core ambitions for what the future of Society6 could look like. The careful balance of scalable solutions interwoven with elevated, unique and delightful interactions became one of the driving mantras behind the project.

04. Evolve the brand to reflect the modern, diverse, creatively dynamic nature of the Society6 community
To build brand and business value in crowded markets, the right digitqal brand expression can make or break and inconsistency can be fatal. Paired with research insights, we leaned into core brand truths to evolve and reinvigorate the Society6 brand at its core to reconnect it with its original core ambitions, ensure that users feel engaged from landing to conversion, and that the brand feels solid no matter the category or channel.

A CUSTOMER EXPERIENCE POWERED BY CREATIVITY AND COMMERCE  —

With a firm strategic footing, and armed with key insights gleaned from deep user research and data analytics, our team set out to redefine the entire Society6 digital experience across three key pillars — customers, artists and the Society6 brand.

Starting with the customer journey first, Pattern crafted multiple directions that employed various best-practices UX, UX innovations that solved specific user problems, and visual and UI treatments that pushed the brand into new territories of differentiation and ownability.

Through a design process that was equal parts rigorous product design and experience-driven eCommerce design, we developed a rhythmic approach to gathering requirements from the business and squaring them up against the opportunities we identified to break through to customers in new ways.

The result is a visually expressive site that lives and breathes artistic creativity and self-expression fueled by a powerful and sophisticated UX system of components that enables inspiration, guidance, configuration, customization and conversion to happen all in the context of Society6 being the best place for their customers to find products that match their journey of self-expression.

WHAT WE DID —

Stakeholder Interview
User Research
Trends, Analytics and Data Insights
Content Strategy
Digital Strategy Roadmapping
Information Architecture
UX Design for Shopify Plus / Shopify Enterprise
Visual & UI Design for Shopify Plus / Shopify Enterprise
Interaction Design
User Testing
Motion Design & Animation
Dashboard Design
Product Customization and Configuration

WORK WITH PATTERN —

Talk to us about Shopify Plus, Shopify Enterprise, and Unified Commerce.

A DIGITALLY-NATIVE APPROACH TO BRAND IDENTITY —

As the new experience started to take shape, the Society6 team realized that the site Pattern had designed represented the brand and its mission better than their current brand guidelines did.

Knowing that, and with a strong vision toward having the Society6 brand show up equally as strong in all of its other touchpoints in addition to the site, Pattern engaged in a new track of work that involved translating all of the bespoke design of the Society6 platform site into a refreshed brand identity.

Having been led by the redesign of the site, the new visual identity platform takes a digital-first approach to branding and scales the creativity, energy and individuality of Society6 and it's artist community into every facet of the brand, from email and social to pop ups and packaging.

AN ARTIST EXPERIENCE THAT PUTS CREATIVITY FIRST  —

Reimagining the artist experience to place Society6 at the top of the consideration list of where great artists show up to sell their work was absolutely crucial to the overall success of the project.

As with the consumer experience, we dove deep into research, testing and interviews with active artists to identify and solve the key pain points they encountered on their signup, setup and management journeys.

Pattern and the Society6 team worked in tandem to simultaneously unravel the technical debt within the artist experience, while completely rethinking and redesigning everything from artist signup and onboarding, profiles and collections to merchandising and product setup.

The design system enables richer storytelling across artist-curated collections, intuitive ways for artists to see earnings progress and milestones, and puts the focus squarely on showing both the artists and their creations in the most immersive, most authentic and most creatively engaging ways possible.

WE'D LOVE TO LEARN MORE ABOUT YOU—

Let's explore new ways of working together. Get in touch and start your next project with us today.

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