Carve Designs is an apparel company focused on fashionable and functional water wear, après surf, and lifestyle collections for women. The company was founded in San Francisco by two female surfers and athletes who were tired of squeezing into junior’s clothing and bored by too many shades of khaki. Carve Designs has dedicated themselves to designing and manufacturing a colorful, fresh, and unique active apparel line that actually fits real women. Mindful of the environment in which we live, Carve Designs uses sustainable fabric as much as possible and uses certified organic cotton. Also a community member, Carve Designs donates a portion of their revenue to the preservation of oceans and beaches. 

Rethink the one-piece thanks to the stylish Cardiff Full Piece. The gathered shoulder straps and deep v-neck front showcase their classically updated sense of design. The women of Carve Designs are determined to push the boundaries of outdoor apparel and prove that functional can be fashionable and well-fitting. 

Last week we posted a blog explaining the customer facing portion of the launch of our new site design evolution, this week we want to tell you that the next phase is hitting the site tonight around 11PM PST.

Last week we launched the newly designed header, footer and also changed the background color of the site. We also made a visual change to the search results page (many more changes to come in that area soon). This week we are changing the visual design to the product pages. The changes are subtle, for this phase the changes revolve solely around visual design. Future phases will tackle interaction challenges and interface challenges, we expect those changes to happen later in Q2 of 2010.

We remain committed to rapidly create a more positive shopping experience for our customers, while making the changes in such a manner that does not introduce confusion. If you find that we are not doing a good job at that please do leave comments here on this blog so we can better learn about your needs! 

Be sure to check the site tomorrow to see the change. Thanks for reading, we hope you enjoy the evolution.

PS, for more frequent updates from the User Experience team at Zappos, feel free to follow us on twitter, @uxzappos

Hi

Over the past several years our User Experience and Development teams have spent a painfully large amount of time working on evolving our site experience. We've had highlights, lowlights and all shades of light in between. Though, we've finally reached the point in which we will more aggressively be rolling out changes to our site to help you, our customers, have a more pleasing experience.

In fact, the first phase of many launches today! You will see our Primary Navigation and Footer take on a new look. Over the next month or two you will see some more aggressive visual changes to the site, including visual changes to our search pages, product pages, checkout and much more. Once we get to a point where much of our site has inherited the new look you will then begin to see changes rolling out that will improve the interaction of our site. Our goal is to evolve our site by making it easier to use, all the while eliminating the likelihood of introducing jarring changes that will negatively effect our loyal customers.

Why are we doing this you ask? It is simple, for you, our customers. We have talked with many of you, heard your complaints, heard your praise. All the feedback has steered us in the direction we are quickly moving towards now. Fortunately though we have made a ton of mistakes in our 10+ year history! Fortunately we like mistakes, mistakes guide our future decisions. Our mistakes have lead us to the point we are at now, a point in which we are very proud of. A point in which all of our wonderful customers can now begin experiencing the results of your feedback.

As we rollout each new phase of the site experience (starting with Visual Design) we will provide an explanation on this blog of what is changing, why it is changing and we will be requesting that feedback be left right here on this blog (or on Twitter, Facebook, email, you name it)! Please, tell us what you think! If you love it, tell us! if you dislike it, tell us! Most importantly, please tell us why. Tell us why so we can continue to evolve our site to best suit your needs!

If we do our job well, you should see a never ending evolution of our site experience… one step at a time!

Thank you all so much for your support over the years, without you there is no us!

This is an open letter response to the blog post here (which wouldn’t allow comments). Though the author has gracefully agreed to post my reply on his follow up post soon.

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Hi Andrew

Thanks for the letter, it not only contained some exceptionally valid points but it also kick-started a lot of chatter all over the web. The chatter, both supportive of your perspective and some anti, has been quite interesting to read as it has provided further (very useful) perspective.

I couldn’t agree more regarding the details that you note will make a huge difference, such as: Clear Iconography, Visual Hierarchy, Unified Link Styles, Blurry Images (at times) and Who, What Why. If we had no external factors involved in our work it would be quite simple to address. I contemplated simply replying to your note with a few comments I got from my incredible team. These comments included: “should we just tell him we know, and we’re working on it”, “I couldn’t agree more” and “wow, did he miss the boat on the design process.” I would like to spend the next couple of paragraphs discussing in a bit more detail each of the comments noted above.

“Should we just tell him we know, and we’re working on it?”
I think I said earlier, we are not even close to 100% pleased with the aesthetics of our site. We’ve had to very carefully figure out how to evolve (never redesign) our site experience. We’ve spent the better part of the year fixing a lot of under the hood pieces, building scalable processes and technology and are finally at a point where we will be dedicating more mindshare to aesthetics. You’d be happy to know, we hired Happy Cog to help us here (http://twitter.com/zeldman/statuses/3988360086).

“I couldn’t agree more.”
Well how could we agree more regarding your few key details section, you are 100% correct. I wish prior to writing your letter that you had some more facts regarding scale of our business, and current state of business to further validate this section and give all the folks talking about your post real information that lead to your proposed design solution.

“Wow, did he miss the boat on the design process.”
I feel it is important to discuss this a bit. We are pretty keen on viewing design as a verb, not a noun here. We never finish designs, we never “redesign”, we evolve. Business needs are always changing, economies change, customer needs change…hence how we tackle these issues need to evolve. What saddens me about the letter is not the critique nor your redesign (which was lovely by the way), rather it is the lack of mention around the most important pieces that need to be answered before entering into a design process. Who are we designing for? Is it paid traffic, organic? Is it for new customers? Existing customers? What percentage of folks search vs. browse? What are the top entrance pages? What is the impact of site speed/load time? I am barely scratching the surface on considerations that must be met before making design evolution decisions, there are many more but I am hoping you and your readers can get my point.

Really, I agree, our site plainly needs to evolve more than it has. It will, but evolution is a process. I am proud of the work my team has done in bringing the site from 1999-2003 as you described it and all within a year. You will soon see something closer to 2010 and eventually you will see an evolution that turns into a revolution. But it will take some more time and it certainly does not nor ever will include a “redesign.“

I appreciate your thoughts, your creativity and your care. I wish every critique I read (many per day) have a proposed solution with it like yours did. I just hope that as members of the design community we can do more acknowledging and addressing of all the difficulty that exists in business that affect the design process. If we can all rally around that concept and share ideas to solve those problems we all will be looking at prettier things more regularly, I guarantee it.

Thank you for posting this reply, looking forward to staying in touch!

Brian Kalma
Director of User Experience/Web Strategy, Zappos.com
(t) twitter.com/krianbalma
(f) facebook.com/krianbalma

Designed by our very own Kyle S.

It was a dark and stormy night A request was submitted by Laura S. It asked for a series of posters to be made for the different areas of KY Content Team.

It all started when all of KYCT team got to pick and vote on the names of certain work areas! I used elements from the Zappos branding guide, including color, typeface, and graphics, and combined them with ‘fun’ design elements that relate to the Fulfillment Center’s superhero theme.

There was a total of 5 posters made:

Hall of Justice = The Meeting Room in studio 2
Strobe City = Live Studio/Studio 2
Heavy metal Graceland = Studio 1
Area 51= Live Studio area in Studio 1
Hall of Illusions = Images area

In a nutshell, I bled for this project. ;)

Written and Designed by Kyle S.