Free People
User Experience Designer
Oct 2013 – May 2014
Projects include Global Search, FP.Me Social Network, and Free People Video.
After college, I was looking to move anywhere. I decided I’d let my career take me to my next job. I started to apply all over the world and the first place that would move me was URBN Inc to work at Free People.
I joined their eCommerce team to primarily work on the Free People Website.
Global Search
When I joined Free People, they had just launched FP.Me. It was a social commerce product that aggregated Free People products sponsored by social media influencers. It then displayed them on the Free People website for people to purchase. This was before Instagram created Instagram Shopping.
Free People’s Global eCommerce search didn’t account for this. Which made it incredibly difficult for people to search for products they found on social media.
We were positioned to design and develop an experience that allowed us to surface these products and make them shop-able without taking away from the original product search.
Since we were amend the original search functionality, we started off by going through a rigorous wire framing process to point out any overlaps or potential problems we’d face in integrating this search function.
Metrics & Outcomes
Overall, this was a massive success. Our CTR of influencer based products when up 54% within the first 3 weeks of launching. FP.Me continued on for 4 years serving up content. Free People discontinued it in 2018.
FP.Me Social Network v2.0
After about 6 months of working at Free People, FP.Me (Free People Social Network for Commerce) was getting a ton of feedback from users.
The primary problem was that people couldn’t find (or discover) others and connect with them on FP.Me. The experience was hindering people’s ability to search for people they may have found on other platforms.
Our goal was simple. Design a feature where people were able to search, find, and follow other users.
Some early sketches can be seen to the right.
Free People Video
This was a simple, one-off project that had a good problem and was fun to work on.
At that time, video was extremely important to eCommerce (probably still is). Free People visitors didn’t have a place on the global site to view our catalog of shop-able lifestyle videos. The only way people could access Free People videos was to visit YouTube. (This didn’t allow for any product conversion, product detailing or shopping.)
We aimed to design a video gallery page that will allow users to cinematically watch any Free People video and shop them as they watched.
Overall this project wasn’t extremely successful, but got the company thinking about other ways to monetize video and new ways of shopping.