We audited a lot of sites within and outside of the athleisure vertical. From the audit we identified what works and what doesn’t and applied our findings accordingly.

Below are annotations of some of the elements we liked from other sites that provided what we felt was the best user experience for general navigation, clear actions, and layout and hierarchy.

1. Almost every website we looked at had a hero image. A hero image immediately arrests a visitor’s attention. Since people respond positively to visual content, having a high-resolution image on the home page is a good way to entice visitors to explore further. Hero images are also extremely useful for directly engaging your site's visitors; we displayed our unique selling proposition and enticed visitors to take a quiz using a CTA button.

2. The sites we liked followed best practices by having NO more than 5-7 items in the primary navigation.

3. The most impactful sites had a clean layout.

1. Having a clear call to action (CTA) is also really important so the user knows what step to take next.

2. Not all customers want the same thing, especially with apparel. Product customization is essential for delivering a personalized customer experience to each segment of users and can drive customer loyalty and increase customer satisfaction.

3. One of our goals was to create engagement on the page by making a quiz irresistible to do and to increase time on our page. So we created a short quiz that would provide the customers a personalized, curated outfit based on the criteria they provide. This also gives us great metrics to better understand who our customers are, where they are, and what they want. A quiz - even a short one keeps the customer on the page longer and generally, for SEO purposes, the longer they spend on the page the better it is for ranking.

4. A sense of community is important for brand loyalty, awareness, and overall success. A strong and engaged community will lead to improved products, learning, and innovation, as well as company growth. The primary nav has a “community” tab that brings you to a gallery of customers wearing their Cammo outfits and sharing their inspirational stories of living a healthy, balanced life.

1. Offering a coupon/discount gives the customer a reason to return. At the end of the quiz, a 15% discount on the curated outfits are offered in exchange for an email address.

2. The clear effort to benefit for the user. For example, explaining what they will get before they do something and providing a progress bar so they know how many steps are involved is very helpful.

3. Clear navigation controls for the user so they never get stuck. Each page must have an emergency exit.

In testing, we initially had the question “What is your body type?” as the first question asked. This immediately turned people off and they did not want to proceed with the quiz. Body type is a necessary question in order to choose a curated outfit so we made it the second last question of the quiz. After committing to the quiz people are more inclined to answer the question and we added body-positive verbiage to help the user feel more comfortable. For example by saying “Cammo believes that all bodies are beautiful, learning your shape will help better personalize your outfit for the most comfortable fit.”

Also, we added a coupon and some locked results in order to help with lead generation. User has to provide their email address in order to unlock two more hidden curated outfits as well as redeem their 15% off coupon code. Initially, this coupon was a pop-up but we removed it and replaced it as text in the sidebar. Popups interrupt you as you’re trying to accomplish something and interrupting your visitors is pretty rude.