Watches Ecommerce
Festina
Product Design | Mobile-first e-commerce
01/
Festina
Festina has been making watches since 1902 and is one of the best-known names in the industry. However, its website wasn't working for everyone.
Over three days, I set out to find who it was leaving behind and to redesign the experience around them. The answer was millennials, people aged 25 to 35 who do most of their shopping on their phones and expect to get from a product to checkout in just a few taps. On Festina's site, they had to dig through more than 25 collections and six steps before they could pay.
I worked on the project end to end, from the initial site audit to a high-fidelity prototype.
02/
Process
I started by going through Festina's website the way a customer would, focusing on how easy it was to find a watch. Four things got in the way. The menu listed more than 25 collections with no clear hierarchy, so you had to know a collection's name to find anything. Large campaign banners pushed the products out of view. Product names and prices were small and hard to read. And the store locator was almost unusable, with so many overlapping pins that you couldn't tell where any shop actually was.
To understand who was most affected, I built a proto-persona for the millennial shopper alongside a SWOT analysis of Festina's online presence. Two insights shaped everything that followed. Millennials have little time and expect to buy in a few taps, without filling in long forms. They're also drawn to versatile, unisex designs, while the site split everything by gender and collection.
Finally, I looked at how direct competitors like Tissot, Swatch, Fossil and Viceroy handle the same journey. The most useful patterns were express checkout and digital wallets, which I adapted to fit Festina's brand.
03/
Outcome
I focused on one goal: getting customers from a watch they like to payment as quickly as possible. The new flow cuts the journey from six steps to four, and express checkout lets them skip the cart entirely.
A few decisions made the biggest difference. Express checkout now sits right on the product page, for anyone who already knows what they want. Apple Pay and Google Pay replace the longest form in the process. Instalment payments are shown upfront, so price is less of a barrier at the moment of decision. And the navigation was reduced to five clear categories instead of more than 25 collections.
I designed the screens mobile-first, keeping Festina's visual identity, and then adapted them to desktop. The prototype below covers the full journey, from the menu to payment.
With more time, I'd test the flow with real users and track checkout conversion, cart abandonment, and how many purchases go through express checkout.
