Chop Suey Club Case Study

Chop Suey Club is a contemporary Chinese designer boutique in New York, NY.  The entire selection is handpicked by the founder, and features unique jewelry, accessories, clothing, books, and home decor sourced from Chinese designers.

The Challenge

Chop Suey Club’s (CSC) website was bulky and often ran into problems converting customers on its mobile version. I worked with CSC to do a thorough site audit, and paired the quantitative Shopify analytics with qualitative feedback to give the website a light UX makeover. The goal was to improve the desktop and mobile responsive website design and information architecture with a focus on performance. You can view the new website here.

Data ANalysis

The website is built on the Shopify platform, which provides handy analytics on conversion rates from mobile vs web, online store sessions by device type, sales by traffic source (direct, search, social, other), and top landing pages. I compiled this data to show where users were dropping off and where the most purchase weight was held. From there, we defined our business goals and agreed on metrics to measure our success.

Website Makeover

Our analytics highlight that purchases from social channels and from mobile devices were the most popular methods our customers were reaching us. I conducted a site audit and went through several user flows (e.g. creating an account, adding item to cart, check out process) on desktop and mobile to see where there were potential places for users to drop off, and where the site could be improved.

I also set up a design system for maintaining consistency across the website that covered product description copy format, image dimensions to fit responsive hero banners, image file sizes for faster loading, website and product SEO, and blog posts and brand pages.

Information Architecture Update

The information architecture of the menu was too messy and in need of an update. Some places were organized by most popular, and others were alphabetized, which could be potentially confusing to the user. Based on some initial user feedback, we opted for an alphabetized format. We also shifted the most popular categories to the front, and minimized the menu options as not to overwhelm the customer.

Marketing Campaigns

The journey doesn’t end here. In order to exceed our business sales goals, we needed to increase our marketing efforts. CSC appointed me to create a series of email marketing campaigns in Mailchimp. I used Mailchimp’s native analytics to inform and adjust future mailing list campaigns to make sure they were effective. CSC loves an emphasis on color and attention-grabbing gifs.

Visual Design

Another big role I have at CSC is creating graphics for our marketing email campaigns, social media, gift guides, gift cards, and events. Below is a selection of my work: