Showcasing the modernity of an ancient art form through E-commerce Design

How might we effectively and intimately share an ancient artisanal process all while maintaining an efficient user purchase experience?

The Project

Ulysse Sauvage is an artisinal glassblower from Paris. During the span of 9 days, Emilie Galan Dreulle, Kevin R., Nadia Abaine and I designed her website from scratch to give her followers a direct way to purchase her products as well as showcase her work and her technique.

Duration: 9 days

Methods: Stakeholder Interviews, User Testing, Wireframing, Prototyping, UI Design

Tools: Figma

Intro

Our stakeholder needed a website separate from her Instagram account and her Etsy store. She wanted to be able to not only sell her products directly from her atelier, instead of counting on a third party, but also wanted to bring attention to her glassblowing technique and vision of the industry so as to keep building her business on solid foundations.

During these 11 days, we chose to focus on a responsive website designed with mobile-first in mind.

Research

Secondary Research

Before starting the project and holding our stakeholder interview, it was important for us to learn a bit more about glassblowing as an art form, as well as have a good overview of the market.

• Glassblowing is the practice of shaping a mass of glass that has been softened by heat by blowing air into it through a tube. It was invented by Syrian craftsmen in the 1st century and surprisingly the technique has remained practically the same to the present day.
• Glassblowing, while an intricate art form, is also incredibly technical and possibly dangerous. Due to its ancient technique, glassblowing requires the glass to get up to 1 148 C°. We were able to notice the stark difference in tones between the physical act of glassblowing and the intricacies of the Stakeholder’s brand which is particularly ethereal and soft.

Stakeholder Interview

During our stakeholder interview, we were able to learn a bit more about Ulysse Sauvage’s work, her view of her industry as well as get a better grasp of her goals for the website, her vision as well as her problems and possible pain points that we had to solve.

Background

Ulysse Sauvage started out her studies at La Sorbonne in Paris, before making the change for l’Académie Royale des Beaux-Arts in Brussels. Her passion for glass was born thereafter her collaboration with a craftsman. Following that, she studied once or twice a week with a glassblower in Berlin, which represent her first steps in glassblowing as a professional. Following a six month contract, she started her career x years ago by buying her first blowpipe and creating her first objects all while honing her style.

Goals

• Grow her brand through exposure, allowing her to create bigger objects in larger quantities so as to expand her brand by selling them to other shops
• All while keeping her vision of accessibility through smaller objects and smaller prices.
• She also wanted to promote her ethic of “Made in France” which is dear to her and her brand
• And finally give an insight into her atelier, how she works and the overall art of Glassblowing which she wants to bring more attention to.

Thus, Ulysse needed a beautiful website that acted not only as an e-commerce website but also as a portfolio that showcased her craft and her work in a professional way.

Stakeholder Pain Points

Ulysse shared 3 main problems with us:

• The first one was her reticence to expand her brand currently. Though she would like to outsource her creations to bigger, physical resellers, she noted that she does not enjoy no having control of the pricing and also not having any contact with her clients directly. Though most of her sales go through her Etsy website, she enjoys having clients come to her Atelier in Montmartre and talking directly to the people who enjoy her work.
• She also feels frustrated over not having a clear view of who her audience is in terms of demographics but also their motivation when buying her art. She feels frustrated that she is unaware if it’s the artisanal aspect or her pricing that attracts potential buyers and noted that she regrets not being able to dialogue more than just receiving a picture and a thank you.
• The final problem she expressed to us is in relation to how she portrays her craft. In French, glassblower is said “Souffleur de Verre”, which is a masculine word. Her goal is to let her work speak for her and bring attention to her art form and to her work more so than her person.

Competitive analysis

During our Secondary Research, we also realised that Ulysse Sauvage doesn’t have a clear direct competitor due to the specificity of her line of work and the uniqueness of her products on the glassblowing market. Thus, we had to proceed with a larger view of the French Artisinal Market.

Heuristics

Due to the fact that we were directly designing a to-be without the “appuie” of an existing website, we decided to do heuristic evaluations of Ulysse’s Etsy Store and another artisan’s website that she provided us for our Competitor Analysis

Etsy

Indirect Competitor

Sitemap

Wireframing and User Testing

The purchase user-flow that we would go on to prototype for our Mid-Fi Wireframe.

When we had a clear idea of the content of the website and how it would be organised, it was important to start thinking about the user, iterating our ideas and testing them. Thus, we created the userflow that we would go on to wireframe for our user tests. As the base of the website is e-commerce, the most logical userflow was the purchase of an object. The motivation of the customer in our minds was to purchase a need in an ethical way, and the goal would be to purchase said object from Ulysse Sauvage.

This userflow made us create the mid-fi wireframes of not only the Home Page you discover as you access the website, but also the Shop Page (that we called Collection for branding reasons) and the Individual Product Page.

Home Page

For the user’s first experience of the website, we wanted to have all of the different features of the site to be directly accessible. It was important in terms of the objectives of the project to first give the user the possibility to discover the process but also to easily access the Portfolio and Shop, which is why we also created direct links to the Products on the Homepage under the Creation banner.

E-Shop

We knew from the beginning that the Stakeholder had a small catalogue that she would sell at any given time. This posed two questions:

• How do we best showcase the available wares
• All while not overloading the user with unnecessary content?

The answer to that is the product page, where we showcase the products in a spaced out yet complete way with a short personalised description of each object, the price and it’s aesthetics in the different colours available.

Individual Product Page

User Testing Insights

For our User Testing, we opted to find users who were interested in handcrafted wares and who would be susceptible of either finding and following Ulysse, but also purchasing her products. The most insightful users were her followers however. The stakeholder agreed to post on her Instagram Story asking her followers if anybody would be interested in testing her new website. This not only answered her desire to have a closer relationship with the people who enjoy her products, but also to get them involved with the process as the website was more for them than for her in a way. The user tests, as always, we invaluable to us. They helped us realise that we were so busy concentrating on how to best showcase her work, we forgot about the ease of the purchase userflow and how, though a portfolio, the website’s main purpose is the sale of her products. This translated to our design not respecting some Usability Heuristics, leading to our design not always being intuitive like our Home Screen not clearly indicating that the user needed to scroll. The prototype was also lacking in a search bar, that a users said she would have used straight away, as well as a back button. Several users also noted about the copy that the website wasn’t clear in it’s language that a Shop was available.

Brand Attributes

For us, brand attributes were primordial in the design process. Because of how aesthetic the stakeholder’s products and current internet presence is, we aimed at finding attributes that would convey the broad scope of emotion that Ulysse conveys aesthetically.

Contemplative, Wistful, Handcrafted

• Contemplative: expressing or involving prolonged thought. We wanted to provoque thought in the users’ mind. Not only in regards to Ulysse’s craft, but also the fact of buying local/artisinal products as an ethical way of consuming. We strived for our design to be accessible, simple, yet complete so contemplative seemed as much of a descriptor as a challenger attribute.
• Wistful: full of yearning or desire tinged with melancholy. This word was hard to find but once we realised that it combined the feeling of profound heritage of the ancient craft of glassblowing with Ulysse’s modern approach, creating a sort of yearning for a time that might not be upon us, we knew we’d hit the nail on the head.
• Handcrafted: made skilfully by hand. Ulysse’s main brand attribute is the hands-on, local and care she puts into all of her work. As we were already using Artisinal in a lot of our copy and the lack of emotion behind the word, we decided to go with Handcrafted. Crafted implies the care she puts into each product as opposed to the term Handmade which felt too distant for our Stakeholder’s image.

Moodboard

The way we created the Moodboard was somewhat original. Our stakeholder gave us a clear colour palette that we could work off of. The colour palette was inspired by her personal taste but also the ambience that she created for her social media presence. Thus, we were able to mostly concentrate on the different imagery and textures we envisioned thanks to her colours, her vision and our brand attributes. We were able to dig deeper until our vision of the project was more complex than where we initially started which was particularly refreshing and gave a fresh spin to the project we had already been working on for a while.

The moodboard we created plays off the warmth of the flame of her chalumeau, the cold intensity of the dark blue she uses, but also plays on transparencies, glint and reflection of her glass, creating a feeling of dreamy yet intense nostalgia.

Key Insights and Takeaways

• You can’t make a user interested in something they’re not. You can however make finding the information they want easier, whatever that may be.
• There is never one type of user. Even if the profiles are similar, they all have their different quirks and habits. Good design is accommodating all of those into one.
• While Stakeholders have a clear vision of their brand, there is a reason that they call upon UX Designers. This first experience of working for a Stakeholder was very gratifying, especially when they love the outcome like Ulysse did. However, going forwards it will have taught me a valuable lesson about the equilibrium between the Stakeholders vision, the Designers insights and the Users’ needs which all have to be accommodated in different ways according to the project.