Master Theme Design Library
Optimizing New Site Launches with an Evolving Design Library
Timeline: August 2024 - Now (Ongoing)
Role: UI/UX Designer
Tools: Figma
The Digital team at Authentic holistically manages a large portion of the company’s brands entirely in-house, from merchandising to design to development, with more in the near future. To ease the process of designing and developing a new site, I worked with developers and our product manager to create a single Master Theme from which new retail sites can be based off.
With the Digital team managing brands end-to-end, it was crucial to optimize the process wherever possible.
OVERVIEW
Typically, before, following guidance from our PM, site design would take approximately a month/two full sprint cycles to finalize prior to fully passing to development. The time for design and development would additionally cut into merchandising and content strategy needs, thereby increasing the overall time needed to prepare for a new site launch. With the team already managing multiple brands, with Vince Camuto, Reebok, and more to come in the future, it was necessary to optimize.
By standardizing common features across our retail brands to create a single “Master Theme” to serve as a foundation, design and development time is cut down.
SOLUTION
With the majority of our brands centering around apparel and shoe, and all of our brands centering around retail, most UX problems aren’t new and don’t require new solutions every time. The product team worked together to decide major elements that could be standardized, as well as document and provide back-end customizations within Shopify for variations of these elements: PDPs, PLPs, navigation menus, etc.
Above, Vince Camuto, Juicy Couture, DC Shoes, and soon Reebok, are all created using the Master Theme base. The PDP layouts largely look the same, with customizations for swatch styling, type styling, and image sizing according to each brand specifications. With this, the amount of brand-specific work is reduced.
This project began with the preparation for Vince Camuto’s launch mid-August, in which Vince Camuto would be the first site to utilize the new Master Theme, and the current brands would be onboarded, with new brands also launching directly from Master Theme.
Design-wise, I created Vince Camuto’s Figma file with the Master Theme in mind and then updated the current brands’ respective files with extensive component organization, type styles, and color styles.
PROCESS
Brands in the same sect of retail, like DC Shoes and Reebok, were able to be standardized even further, such as with PLP elements with swatches appearing upon hover.
Since so much additional time was saved with the launch of the Master Theme, the team was able to spend more time to innovate on non-MVP features for brands, such as Vince Camuto’s customizable image navigation on the PLP. Because of the shared parent Master Theme, these features can additionally be tweaked for use on other brand sites.
IMPACT
Without the Digital team being structured the way it is, giving me insight into the end-to-end process from merchandising to content strategy to design and development, it would have been much more difficult for me to understand how to improve in my role in a way that would impact the rest of the team. A key learning here for me is that rather than adding new processes or steps, it can be just as impactful to improve upon a current and familiar process.
REFLECTION