Moda Private: Web App for Style Advisors
As the lead designer overseeing our VIP Client’s experience, I spearheaded a full overhaul of Moda Operandi’s proprietary platform that helps their Style Advisors connect and manage their client portfolios more efficiently.
Role: Design Direction, Execution, Research and Product strategy
Designing a Web App for Moda’s Style Advisors
The VIP Client Business
Challenges and Opportunities
In addition to their e-commerce business, Moda Operandi offers a personalized shopping experience for their VIP clients through an Advisor. Style Advisors help our VIP clients all over the world realize their personal style through Moda Operandi products. To be part of the service you have to had spend over $5k a year.
While the business keeps growing YoY, with about 52k active clients and over 1.5M assigned client YTD, client spending keeps decreasing YoY. (-4%)
Style Advisors currently rely on multiple sources and an outdated platform, called Stylist Suite, to manage their growing portfolio of clients. This platform doesn’t meet the needs of Advisors today since it is not seen as very insightful or actionable.
How might we help Style Advisors grow, understand, and manage their business efficiently?
Discovery & Research
Understanding The Role of The Advisor
We ran a series of user interviews with eleven of them. Our goal was to better understand how an Advisor worked day and day out, learn about the types of interactions they have with their clients, the tools they use, and how they grow their business.
After synthesizing our findings, I saw clear patterns emerge and put together a set of key findings to share with my team, the PCA Senior Leadership team as well as all the advisors.
Understanding the Private Clients' Needs
When I joined the company, it was clear that everyone had a high-level idea of who the Moda customer was, fashion savvy women looking for the latest trends and exclusive designer pieces. However, my team and I knew that in order for us to get a full picture of the business we had to uncover what these clients were looking for when working with an Advisor.
With the help of the Advisors, we sourced several clients to talk to about their overall experience. Our goals was to learn about how they communicate with the advisor and hopefully understand if and when we were doing a good job of fulfilling their overall needs.
After talking to eight clients spanning from Tier 6 to Tier 2, we synthesize our finding and created three, tier agnostic, personas that we felt spoke more about the clients needs, pain points, and desires.
Focusing the Team: Cross Functional Design Sprint
After doing extensive discovery research, we felt that there was a lot of we could do to help Advisors, a lot of ideas floating around, and a lot of surface area to cover.
In order to keep the momentum going from our research, I planned a five day Design Sprint to help us uncover what we felt where the most impactful strategic areas tech could help move the needle for the business.
The Sprint included the PCA business owner, the Director of Product Management, the Director of Engineering, a Senior Engineer, an Analyst, and two Advisors. In addition, I created special end of day sessions to bring key stakeholders in and walk them through our progress, our decisions, and to make sure we were on the right path.
Design Solution
As a result, we decided to update the main internal platform the Advisors use. Our goal was to create a web app that helps solve some of the challenges they face on their day to day workflows while improving the experience they provide to their clients.
The Moda Private App consists of various features, but our initial goal is to make sure we are surfacing all relevant and important information Advisors need in order to take action. In addition, give them a seamless way to contact their clients without leaving the app.
VIP Client Profile View
There were several things we had to take into consideration when building a new client profile view. We had to make sure we were highlighting the important information an Advisor needs to know about their client, whether they are new to the program or a long time shopper.
We introduced more information about the client, form their size preferences, colors, and brands based on their past purchases and conversations the Advisor has had with them.
We also wanted to make the profile a lot more insightful, therefore we came up with a view called “Habits”. The purpose of this view is for Advisors to track their clients YOY activity and find patterns that might make them want to take an action or reach out to them with relevant information.
A Better Trunkshow Experience for Advisors
Trunkshows are Moda’s main differentiator, giving client’s the opportunity to buy products right off the runway. For VIP Clients, it is important to work with a Style Advisor that is in the know of upcoming shows and identify products that they might want to buy ahead of time.
On the new App, we wanted to give Advisors a Trunkshow experience where they could see the upcoming collections, information about the designers, and seamlessly share products to specific clients.
We knew that one of the biggest asks was provide a way to easily share products with clients, therefore aim to introduce a quick way to choose products, and add them to an email, where the user can then pick recipients based on past purchases, clients that might be interested based on their designer affinities, and lists they have created to target specific clients.
