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Make Up For Ever (Responsive Retail Website Design)
Fluid
San Francisco, CA
This project is an oldie but a goodie. In grad school I interned at a company called Fluid in San Francisco that specializes in building custom e-commerce websites. Their customers include(d) The North Face, Henri Bendel, and Life is Good, to name a few that I can remember.
My biggest project from this time was designing a fully responsive retail website for Make Up For Ever (MUFE). My work included creating a site map for both the shopping and non-commercial elements, designing all pages for desktop, tablet, and mobile, and documenting all behaviors and interactions for the client's engineering team in a comprehensive functional specification.
Process
When I joined this project, Fluid had already won the bid with MUFE to design their e-commerce site. As a cosmetics company, it was very important to MUFE that the website reflect the brand's core values: it needed to be visually compelling, sleek, and focused on professional makeup artists as the target market. Fluid was chosen to design the site, largely due to the visual direction pitched, so it was imperative that the UX work maintained as much fidelity as possible to the aesthetic that won us the account to begin with.
That said, there is more complexity to creating an e-commerce website than its visual styling. We began making sense of the shape of the website by engaging with the client and mutually creating a taxonomy of products and other requirements for the site. We used this information to build a site map and set expectation for the scope of the engagement. It also allowed the UX team to collectively nail down global elements and patterns that would carry over to all levels of the site (navigation, general page structure, utility placement, responsive behaviors).
The entire design process took ten weeks. We iterated on UX design as a UX team, in collaboration with the visual design team, and through weekly (and sometimes daily) discussions with the client. While Fluid does offer development services, MUFE chose to implement the design themselves. As such, a detailed functional specification of the final design was produced to explain all features and behaviors. Louis Vuitton Moët Hennessy, the conglomerate of which MUFE is a part, praised this document as the cleanest and most comprehensive functional specification they had ever seen.
Contribution
As an intern on this project, I was at first partnered with more senior designers to help concept, iterate, and wireframe pages or features they assigned to me. Over time, I was given more responsibility and autonomy. Perhaps my favourite part of the experience was writing the functional specification, of which my manager and I were the sole authors. Selected pages of this document can be viewed below. I have continued to use "func specs" as a documentation method, a design practice, and a teaching tool.
Global Design Patterns
Global Page Structure
MUFE_funcspec_MRZ_Page_123
Global Design Patterns
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