Awards:
Web Awards – Exceptional Site
American Design Awards – Silver
The challenge was to take the Mariloff brand and move it from a regional diamond and jewelry retailer to a nationally known brand. The site architecture had to create user flows that would accomplish a number of diverse goals. First, to make it easy for consumers to browse and buy a large variety of jewelry and diamonds. This was complicated by the need to be able to represent numerous types of stones, metals and subcategories. Second, the site had to be able to educate consumers not only about general fine jewelry information but also the advantage of shopping with Mariloff.
A new vision of online jewelry shopping
The design of nearly 200 pages took 6 months to perfect the pages templates and create an overarching brand image that could then be tailored to appeal to all of the different user personas. In addition to the consumer site there was also an entire private area of the site that was built so it could be customized for Mariloff’s other business segment where they would sell directly to employees of large corporations at an even larger discount. The success of the user experience design was clear after the site launched when there was a sharp increase in purchases and time on site coupled with a sharp decrease in questions, book flow exits and call volume.
“This is one of the best-designed e-commerce sites we have seen. The color scheme and layout are spot-on. It’s clean, simple and very effective. In addition, we don’t get lost or wonder how to get back to where we just were. We’ll talk more about it in usability, but there is not a single change we would recommend on the design. It really is excellent work.”
– excerpt from an independent Web site evaluation by OpenVision.com
Easily find 1000’s of products
Work on the visual designs began in conjunction with the user experience design because of the complexity of the site and the fact that the goal was to create a site that was high functional and informational but those aspects were presented in a way that didn’t feel too cold or cluttered.
High touch and high detail
Buying high dollar jewelry online isn’t a common process for most people so the design of the site had to be extremely informational and it have to give the customer easy access to Mariloff’s expertise and staff at every point in the process.
