J.C. Nordt • Project & UX Lead • cyor.newcitymedia.com (demo)

About

J.C. Nordt is a jewelry manufacturer. This web-app was created to provide a seamless customization experience via an in-store application.

Responsibilities:

Guiding the vision for the project as team lead
Information Architecture
Interaction Design
Music and Sound

A Custom Experience

The home screen allows users to choose from the showcase, favorites, or to create a new ring from scratch. The backbend is fed by a SQL Server database via php.

The Puzzle

How do you allow a user to search through 11,000 possible configurations without getting lost? How do you show a price (a client requirement) before you know what you are ordering? We created a "circular" theme that allows a user to move through the app in a way that helped them narrow their choices.

Gallery

The gallery pages allowed users to save favorite or popular choices. Saved rings could be used as launch pads for further configuration.

Ordering

After making a selection, the user could choose an additional matching ring when placing an order. The ordering was tied into the client's existing legacy system.

Behind the Scenes

Precious Metal
Each ring's cost is based partly on the weight of it's precious metal. The back-end allows administrators to set pricing for the current price of gold, copper and platinum via a web service which was then dynamically fed to the app.

Competition
We examined a number of online jewelry sites to help determine what worked and what could be improved. Good photography was vital.

Realism
Early in our exploration, we looked at creating the rings in 3-D, as the client was able to provide us with CAD files. However, we had a hard time getting the look we wanted and felt that good photography would lend greater credibility.

Faceted Search
Perhaps one of the biggest challenges of the project was figuring out how to allow the user to browse all 11,000 potential custom rings without getting lost or feeling overwhelmed.

We decided that an ideal approach was to provide an intuitive way to filter the returned record set and for the app to "remember" what had already been selected. The result was that the user never had to select from more than 7 choices and the filtering process felt organic vs linear.