Oak + Fort - UX/UI Case Study

My Role

Oak + Fort is a fashion brand known for providing affordable minimalist luxury fashion.

This project took place in 2023 as a personal passion project, and I took on the role of a UX/UI designer and researcher to redesign Oak + Fort’s website.

The Ask

The primary goal was to visually re-design Oak + Fort’s website to better reflect the brand, while improving its overall user experience.

All user research & competitor analysis, as well as wireframes, prototypes, and mockups (as seen in the final demo video) were conducted and created by myself.

Pain Points

To begin, I first identified all areas of Oak + Fort’s current website that I felt clashed with its in-store branding, and brainstormed how these areas could be best addressed.

I found these different pain points within Oak + Fort’s current website:

Inconsistent Branding
- Oak + Fort’s in-store branding is sleek and minimalistic, but their website does not quite reflect that, implementing many design choices that are not usually observed in similar brands. (ex. Essentials)
- More white-space and proper sectioning could be incorporated to increase visual clarity and appeal.
- Numerous “promotional” headers take up a lot of space and clash with Oak + Fort’s brand identity as a clean-cut, minimalist fashion store.
Lacks Intention
- Various unnecessary functions are included which lead to clutter.
- “Chat Agent” function is very redundant - users who are looking for these types of functions will find them without the feature being mandated. This could instead be moved to a separate webpage such as “Contact Us” to minimize clutter.
- “Shop by Category” is redundant and takes up unnecessary vertical space, given that users can already shop by category by filtering through the header.
- “Shop Social”, “Oak Refined", “Shop Instagram” are all unnecessary headers that take up space given that all of these bring degrees of arbitrary definitions.

Competitor Analysis

A common trend observed is that with higher price point brands came a website focused more towards a more minimalist, editorial-style website, whereas more affordable competitor brands gravitated towards having many promotional headings and cluttered texts, as seen in some examples below.

I wanted Oak + Fort’s website to live up to it’s brand slogan of “affordable luxury” both visually and through it’s user experience.

High-fid Prototypes

Below are the final high-fidelity prototypes that were designed in Figma. The goal of the visual rebrand was to change the website into a more minimalist, editorial style, while also improving the functionality of the website to create a more seamless user experience.