The luxury jewelry brand LAGOS recently approached the I-SITE team with a major challenge. Their new eCommerce website was delivering results, but they had noticed increasing numbers of LAGOS loyalists and new fans were accessing the site from their smartphones. Every customer counts, so we forged a partnership to design and build an mCommerce website to deliver a great mobile browsing experience, and consequently sales.

The first step of the project was to perform a comprehensive review of the LAGOS desktop website, sales and marketing plans, branding materials and programs of their competitors. We were surprised that few of the leading luxury brands had developed mobile websites and recognized the opportunity for LAGOS to stand out in a very competitive marketplace.

We set out to create a mobile site that would do justice to the beauty of the jewelry while functioning seamlessly across iOS, Android, and those other devices that fit snugly in customers’ hands. Since the primary goal of the mobile site is to drive sales, the early work was focused on developing an optimum user experience for the shopper to ensure they complete their transactions. We also determined the content and features that we felt were appropriate for the mobile site as well as the desktop website. These include a Store Finder, Events, Product Search and Filtering, and the ability to share items with friends via Twitter, Facebook, Pinterest or email.

One of the greatest design challenges during this project was deciding how to organize all the content to fit on mobile devices. We prioritized certain functionality (like browsing through products) and grouped together the less vital, but still important information (like signing up for newsletters) on the bottom of each page. It was very important that we did not leave any content out or make any generalizations about the context of mobile devices. Someone browsing on their phone isn’t necessarily on-the-go, and should always be given the opportunity to view all the content that the desktop site offers. We explored each type of content to decide whether it needed a mobile view, and the rest we still made available in an easy menu, just in case. The goal was to deliver a solution that organized the already existing content in an intuitive way.

On the technical front, we leveraged the existing LAGOS website framework to develop a custom solution that employs techniques of responsive design and preserves essential features of the desktop website, such as product filtering. LAGOS’s main site runs on a custom-built PHP content manager, so we worked closely with their web team to connect the new mobile features into the current back end for ease of management moving forward.

Now fully versed in LAGOS’s fabulous jewelry collections, we are continuing to work with the their team to optimize the mobile website and increase sales.