Veja Impact

5-week UX Design Project

overview.

Veja Impact is a microsite that displays an interactive guide to the customer’s purchased shoe model. The guide aims to gradually build the Veja customer’s interest in sustainability and develop 3-level of engagement that aligns to Veja’s brand mission of being sustainable. My role in this project is art direction, interaction design, and experience design.

brand context. 

Veja is a growing European footwear brand focusing on a balance between fashion and sustainability. Veja implements six times the average sneaker manufacturing cost due to their use of premium sustainable materials, free trade and ethical suppliers.

framing.

Veja's ideal customer base are individuals who support sustainability and anti-consumerism. They currently have a large existing casual customer base buying their sneakers solely for collection and style purposes without knowing the deep sustainable process behind each of their purchased sneakers. 

From the brand study of Veja, we formed our initial framing as: 

How might we engage the casual customer to be more involved in sustainability?

persona.

We decide to use a persona spectrum over a set persona to better isolate the trait of "Sustainability" within Veja's customers. Fanning it out in a spectrum helps us better categorize and compare an isolated trait between the vast variety of casual Veja customers. 

01 - Indifferent to sustainability: The individual who is indifferent and actively ignores sustainable activities or movements. 

02 - Partially Sustainable: The individual that occasionally partakes in low-effort sustainable activities (ex. recycling) 

03 - Sustainability Advocate: The individual who is sustainable through all of their consumer and living habits

research insight.

Our group targets the casual customer’s point of purchase in their online shopping journey to extend value in the post-sale phase. At first, we found it is reluctant to directly leverage the idea of being sustainable to causal customers because most of them are not direstly related to these movements or do not care about them. 

But from the research and surveys, we get the main insight for our design intervention:

Casual sneaker buyers expressed high interest in “shoe maintenance tips” as follow-up information to their sneaker purchase, in the form of an email and text graphics on the shoebox.

reframing.

3-level engagement.

entry point

follow-up email.

Driven from the research insights, I lead with shoe material maintenance tips in the form of a follow-up email to the platform's landing page to yield the highest click-through rate from the customer. 

level  1 - discover

care tips + sustainable material.

Scrollable card-style care tips enable customers to easily digest the instructional information while a vector drawing navigation enables them to visually navigate the sections of their newly purchased shoe. 

level  2 - explore

materials story.

I use the commonly asked question of "Why this sustainable material?" from user interviews as the call to action content  to interest the customer to explore deeper into the material. A hover interaction is included to display a comparison between Veja’s material chose versus the leading industrial alternatives, to clearly inform customers about the benefits of using sustainable materials. 

level  3 - participate

connection to online petitions.

The guiding call to the action within the materials story section allows the casual customer to directly participate and support sustainable movements relevant to what they've just read and learned about.

takeaways.

From this project, I learned a lot about how to guide the audiences through an interface to gradually reach the primary goal. Our 3-level engagement successfully created the platform for our target audience to smoothly understand sustainability and be willing to join the sustainable movements. Moreover, I found copyrighting plays a big role in UI design since it needs to be attractive enough for users to make further explorations.