Helped Loose Grown Diamond, a lab-grown diamond jewelry brand, in improving their website's user experience, ultimately leading to an increase in revenue

Overview

Loose Grown Diamond is a diamond and fine jewelry business based in India. They sell diamonds and jewelry mostly in the United States. In December 2020, they contacted me to design a new website that would sell lab-grown diamonds and jewelry. I took them on as a client and began working with them as a UX designer contractor.

Role

I led and solo-designed the e-commerce website for them, and worked with a development agency to implement the design and support through launch.

The Challenge

• The initial challenge was that there are many large and well-established jewelry brands that sell diamonds and engagement rings. How could Loose Grown Diamond (LGD) differentiate itself and gain market share?

• We wanted to launch the first release to test the idea that customers would like LGD's products and offerings.

• We also wanted to create a customizable engagement rings module and offer a variety of ring settings.

• Other jewelry brands offer 100,000 lab-grown diamond options, so LGD needed to figure out how to implement this.

The Goals

• Identify the problems that customers are facing when buying rings and lab-grown diamonds. Draw the correct conclusions about what customers need and want from a website.

• Make it easy for customers to browse and find the rings and lab-grown diamonds they are looking for.

• Provide customers who are facing problems paying high amount for their rings and diamonds.

• Offer financing options to help customers make their purchases.

• Give confidence to customers why to choose Loose Grown Diamond.

• Design the website so that it can easily be updated with new products and features.

• Provide detailed information about each product, such as the carat weight, clarity, color, and cut.

• Offer a wide variety of diamonds and rings to choose from.

Project Kickoff and Early foundational research

After a few discussion sessions, we had a clear business strategy. We now need to turn it into a website strategy and scope.

To start, we wanted to know who our customers are, what their pain points are, and how they are currently experiencing buying lab diamonds and engagement rings in the United States.

Here are some specific questions we wanted to answer:

• Who are our target customers?

• What are their pain points when buying lab diamonds and engagement rings?

• What are their expectations for a website that sells lab diamonds and engagement rings?

• What are the features and functionality that are most important to them?

• What is their budget?

Once we have a better understanding of our customers, we can start to develop a website strategy and scope. This will include defining the website's goals, features, and functionality. We will also need to develop a budget and timeline for the project.

Discovery and User Research

We recruited participants through personal networks and RRP Diamonds's (parent company of Loose Grown Diamond) customers in the United States. We interviewed 5-10 participants to understand their pain points about buying lab-grown diamonds and engagement rings.

User interviews revealed that customers:

• Want alternative options to natural diamonds for their engagement rings.

• Want a reasonable price that is lower than big brands like James Allen, Brilliance, Brilliant Earth, and Blue Nile.

• Do not like the high prices of natural diamonds, which make them unaffordable for some customers.

• Want to buy a diamond online and have the setting done locally.

• Like custom settings and rings, and do not like the brand's designs.

These findings helped us to understand the needs and wants of our target customers, and to identify the key features and functionality that our website should have.

Brainstorming and ideation

After understanding the requirements and data, we started sketching and wireframing the various solutions that were possible.

Solution

In a competitive lab-grown diamond and jewelry market, Loose Grown Diamond is ready to offer a best-in-class experience for both buying a lab-grown diamond and building and ordering custom engagement rings.

We used WordPress with WooCommerce for the site. Stripe, Klarna, Crypto, and Direct Transfer as payment aggregators.

I also helped LGD with their social media reach, brand campaign, and Google Ads.