WorkMethodAbout

Case study

2020

L'ÉquipeLapierre

Performance as a mindset

eCommerce, Website, Visual Design

Long story short

One name, 70 years of innovation, shared passion. With a French touch.

My role

Strategy Design Systems
Design + Execution
UI Engineering
Assets & Content Management

Company

ACCELL

I was part of the established design team and responsible for the design system and visual experience strategy of the new global Lapierre website. I lead the UI and art direction work, producing all major deliverables and presenting these to stakeholders.
I worked alongside branding managers, a graphic designer, content editors, SEO specialist, developers, a UX Lead and a product owner.
Daily operations included working agile in 2 weeks sprints.

Disciplines involved (A-Z)

Design — Branding — Content — Development — SEO

The Challenge

Our team was under pressure from both a deadline and a pandemic. Communication proved rather difficult at times due to external personal factors and distancing. However team proved resilience and professionalism. On top of this our design system and our platform needed to adjust to new requirements from stakeholders, which wanted a strong visual presence.
Existing content was in need of a management system. New assets needed to be created.

User story

As an active biker
I want to benefit of the latest and greatest technology
So that I can feel empowered, confident and self-aware.

Persona, Goals
And Emotional Design

When I'm being asked to "make it pretty", I fall back to "emotional design". According to Don Norman’s book — "Emotional Design", it’s important to translate end user goals into the product’s experience. We need to consider the user’s motivations:

  • How a user wants to feel
  • What a user wants to do
  • Who a user wants to be
Sports persona

Design System
at work 

The aim of the Design System is to ensure we all share the same point of view on the position of Lapierre in the world, so that we can continue to build our global brand in a uniform and consistent way.
Based on OOUX(Object Oriented UX) framework. Add Gatsby, kept together by Storyblok, mixed with Shopware.

Brand Driven
Core Design Principles

Brand benefits were at the core of design decisions:

  • Target audience of sporty and active leisure bikers
  • Functional design to incorporate quality and innovation
  • Emotional design to empower, feel confident and self-aware

From Brand Book to
Online Presence (Web Design)

To understand Lapierre’s spirit we must first acknowledge why the brand exists, what do they do and what drives them.

  • Brand story, archetype and foundations — for understanding the brand essence and the target audience
  • Visual Guidelines — for achieving the best visual content when creating and using product imagery, beauty shots or lifestyle photography
  • Visual Language — for aligning visual constrains within cross functional teams:
    Color / Space, Grid and Layout / Fluid Typography / Iconography / Interaction / Motion / Imagery

Visual Design
in Balance with UX and Content

We took the challenge to implement a dark theme to suit the brand’s art direction of SuspenceSubtetly Balance.
"Lapierre’s elegance lies in tension and suspense. By not revealing the gear in its entirety. By leaving our audience to wonder."

According to the branding book: "We achieve that by playing with lights and shadows, underlining the gear or emotion we want to highlight, and leaving the rest in the dark. Visuals have a unique signature, half-way between premium shots and reverie photography."

View Design System *
* NOTE: Only the chosen ones may see it, so be prepared for a password.

UX & Visual pleasantries

Users want to see a beautiful bike where technology prevails. Match the filename with an SEO keyword and the right copy description and you design for both robots and humans.
Lapierre - Subtetly
Lapierre - Subtetly

Brand, Neutrals, Semantic

Colors and
Accessibility

To structure an easy maintenance strategy within the multi-brand headless platform the colors were split as follows:

  • Brand
  • Global
    • Neutrals — they can work alongside any brand color and don’t draw a user’s attention away from the main focus on a color manipulation task or workflow.
    • Semantic — they have assigned meanings used sparingly and intentionally to reinforce hierarchies and to create clear modes of communication.

This allows the brands to customize their own colors without the fuss of dealing with selecting functional colors. Neutrals and semantic palettes have been carefully chosen and tested to ensure the best possible contrast (AA/AAA compliant). They also follow design patterns to set expectations of meaning for users.

Design System - Colors Contrast Ratios

Full-On Brand
experience 

It's not about a trend

Light vs. Dark

Dark mode was a requirement from the Branding team, as a stakeholder. The UI needed to be dark when showing beauty shots(1) to enhance the elegance of the bike design(2).

  • Beauty shots (1) offer an in depth detail shot of a product and can be very effective at highlighting a product's design features and/or technology. They are different from a product detail shot as the art direction approach is to quantify as much as possible the design. Beauty shots can effectively be used instead of product detail shots.
  • Reasoning (2) — Being photographed against a dark background would highlight the frame shape and its color, thus a light UI background would take away the focus. Achieving the best contrast was key.

In opposition to orientation pages, the functional and decision making sections of the website were kept on a light mode, to ensure that users’s experience was not altered. Such is the case for product listing, checkout and articles.

In achieving technical depth in visual design the following were carefully considered and touched upon:

  • Brightness — to distinguish details (text and imagery work seamlessly).
  • Contrast — to ensure legibility and focus.
  • Layout density — to display relevant product information based on Marketing research consolidated by UX research and validation.
Lapierre - OCampaignListBanner
Lapierre - OCampaignListBanner

Campaign 
the visual object

The Campaign Object

A campaign is a series of activities around informing, reminding or persuading its target audience about its product or service, across various mediums.

Content blocks are conected with other defined objects making possible various combinations to help quickly, easily and with speed build an online campaign.

Lapierre - OCampaignListBanner
Campaign Banner - the image or video should is different from the one in used on the homepage to avoid being flagged as duplicate content.
Lapierre - OCampaignListBanner
USPs - uses the same content block with different content managed from the CMS.
Lapierre - OCampaignListBanner
Product line object shows a preview of the entire range of products, including access to the product detail.
Lapierre - OCampaignListBanner
Overlay Menu - shows active campaign. Please note that content managers are able to do so via CMS from only place. Multiple active campaigns are also possible.

By The rules

Image Product Gallery

Image grid is, as its name suggests, a solution to display all product images in an engaging way. It was designed to work with aspect ratio as follows:

  • 4 : 3 for landscape
  • 2 : 4 for portrait

Note — Aspect ratios ensure that the grid works properly and everything is neat. Even though it works without uploading the proper images it is recommended that content editors do so.

Lapierre - Image Grid Design System Rules
Lapierre - OCampaignFull Product Hero
Product hero — enhances the product and pushes the brand.
Lapierre - OCampaignFull Product Gallery
Product gallery — product images are taken to the next level.
Lapierre - OCampaignFull Product Hero
Size & geometry section — industry standard plussed by interaction.

The Product
Line Series

OProductLine — A product line is a group of connected products marketed under a single brand name by the same company.

Lapierre - OCampaignFull Product Hero
Aircode DRS — Product line Hero
Lapierre - OCampaignFull Product Hero
Size & geometry section — industry standard plussed by interaction.
Lapierre - OProductLineXL
OProductLineXL — Small screens.
Lapierre - OProductLineXL Product Hero
ProductLineXL — Large screens.

It's in
the Basket

Lapierre - Basket - Large screens
Basket — Large screens.
Lapierre - Basket - Small screens
Basket — Small screens.

The End

Deliverables

  • UI Library in Sketch
  • Documentation
  • Code (for UI Components)
  • Assets
  • Design Tokens
  • Prototyping
  • CMS schema setup (alongside Content and UX)
  • Zeroheight for Lapierre

Personal Note

The Best Rides
are Bumpy

Lapierre offered me the chance to blend many perspectives within a single user experience. In hindsight I should have been more vocal when designing with content that we didn't have. I should have promoted more the importance of Visual and Emotional Design within the customer experience. Usability was put at risk for both customers and teams involved.

Out there

View Lapierre.comView Design System

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