Style by Sarai

Style by Sarai is a luxury lifestyle consulting company that empowers individuals to feel strong and confident in their personal style. The brand achieves this through providing the tools and frameworks necessary for a client to be their own style icon.

For latest updates on the company: Style By Sarai

The scope of my role at Style By Sarai is to revamp the online presence and strategy for the brand and to redesign the company website. Also, I’m working closely with the team to design and develop new online apps and products. As the only technical member of the team I am responsible for both the design and development of these products.

Below I have highlighted the process and steps I took in order to design and develop the new website for Style By Sarai as well as the the process I'm currently using to design new products for the company.

1. Requirements Gathering
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The first step in the process was to gather requirements for the project. I met up with the team and discussed everything about the company including: company vision, customers, why they want to update their website and the experience the company provides their customers. The interesting part of this project was to bring the experience clients have with in person-consultations with the brand to the online experience.
After learning more about the company and reviewing the previous website, we worked together to build out a sitemap and architectural overview of the website to help with all the initial details I needed to design initial concepts.

2. Design
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After reviewing the previous website, it was evident that the website needed to be updated and modernized. But the main issue with the previous website was it wasn’t mobile friendly, so when designing the new website I ensured to pay close attention to modernizing the website, simplifying it to only include important details and to ensure the website was mobile friendly.
In the design stage I had frequent meetings with the team to bounce ideas and ensure the design direction was up to par with the company’s vision. I followed an iterative design approach and made sure to get as much feedback as possible to improve the designs.

3. Development
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After the team and I settled on the designs I began development of the website. By following a user-centred design first approach, the development time was significantly decreased and the development stage was faster and more efficient. After developing the website I had some final meetings with the team to improve specific aspects of the design before launch.
Once we launched the website, I talked with clients and discussed the website to see if there could be any final improvements. The feedback we got was positive and improving the website led to better customer turnover from the online channels.
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The final website and most recent version an be viewed online at: Style By Sarai

This position has taught me a lot and the skills I developed as a product designer are invaluable. One of the important experiences I gained was how to maintain a client relationship and how to deliver a product while working with restrictions such as time limitations and client expectations.
Another important takeaway from this experience was following a design first approach proved to be the best. This allowed for easy iteration on the designs while working with the Style by Sarai team and we worked until we achieved a final design. After following this process, when it came to development the dev time was greatly decreased and more efficient as changing designs while in the dev stage is more costly.