With Farfetch going through a period of enormous internal growth, the issue of keeping up design processes started to reveal major inconsistencies in the platform's design language. I worked alongside Alexander Artsvuni to refresh the mobile app whilst creating a toolkit to help the rest of the team adapt.
Time
4 months
Team
1 Lead Designer
1 Product Designer
2 User Experience Researchers
Inventory check
Took an inventory check of the platform and made note of visual and UX inconsistencies
Design and research
Integrated real data into our designs to inform product decisions as well as hacking our existing design tools to help us make more consistent design decisions
Development
Worked closely with our devs to hand off the new design language
Previous design
We created a strict set of rules for the team which included a small palette of colours, typestyles, and spacers. Starting at a component level and gradually building up to full screens, these became the foundation of the current pattern library. Easily maintainable and easy to understand, they were an effective source of truth for designers.
As the content of the product listing and display pages were never static it was important to design flexible components rather than a sketch file with a single Gucci top mocked up across all designs.
Using Framer we were able to design a single product listing unit with all the edge case logic built in, have it loop into a grid, and parse in the item data using raw JSON from the Farfetch API. This lead to a seamless developer handoff and more accurate user research learnings.
I coded quality interactions alongside the new design language. These were prototyped using Framer classic and handed off using code.
The goal of this project was to nurture brand wide consistency alongside a rapidly growing design team. The solution involved simplifying the process of creating and modifying designs and investing in our design tools to uphold speed and consistency.
Small as these changes may seem, this design overhaul contributed to an increase in GMV by 15% across the platform and laid the foundation for a more iterative design process.