For most eCommerce companies, a native app is a no-brainer: more popular with shoppers, better lead quality and conversion rates, higher experience fidelity, and more. After joining the Fabletics team, I helped Product leadership define what the future of native looks like for a company that grew up as a website and is now a billion-dollar brand with hundreds of retail locations.
For me and my design team, that meant a mix of tactical work and strategic ideation. Investing early in building out Figma tools like our app design system allowed us to deliver day-to-day design work rapidly and spend more time on research and ideation around the future state we wanted to reach.
That vision for the future was rooted in a variety of influences: direct input from executive stakeholders, clear patterns in what we heard from users across feedback channels, and our own desire to deliver a native experience that felt genuinely world class among other players in the space like Lululemon, Athleta, and Vuori.
Competitive analysis rhythms were a big part of our process. Regular auditing helped me and my team keep our instincts strong and provided a steady stream of inspiration to share with our Product partners as they advocated for new initiatives with execs.
Driving everything was our intention to make the native experience feel deeply interwoven with the entire customer journey of a Fabletics member, not just the part that happens on their phone. That meant parity with web where users expected it, retail-first features that made shopping at a Fabletics store with your phone feel like magic, and members-only perks to deepen the joy our subscription users got from being part of the Fabletics community.
As 2021 wound down, I dove into a couple of areas we've been itching to refresh: our home and our member profile screens. Long-time subscribers and retail employees were excited to see the emphasis on in-store shopping, and execs were excited to see a fresh take on our years-old app.
Check out a couple of before-and-after mocks below and click here for a narrow prototype of the home screen.
