Galeries Lafayette
Redesigning the Galeries Lafayette Product Page: A UX Case Study
For our final project at Ironhack, we redesigned the product detail page of Galeries Lafayette, the iconic French department store selling everything from fashion to skincare and home goods. The goal: make the page feel more premium, and make it convert better, for Gen Z and millennial women, a segment driving most of the luxury market's growth.
Project Duration:
2 week Sprint
Scope:
UX Research - UI design - UX design
Project members:
2
Tools:
Figma, Claude Ai, Gemini, Figjam AI
Finding Our Focus
We wanted to improve navigation and premium perception through fluidity and micro-interactions, lift the add-to-cart rate, support the ROPO journey (research online, purchase offline), and prepare the page for AI and conversational search.
What the research told us
Secondary research set the stage: Gen Z and millennials drive 75% of luxury market growth, 88% research online before buying in store, and over half already use conversational AI while shopping.
Our own interviews with women aged 20 to 35 sharpened that picture. Every participant described anxiety around fit and sizing, every one described a hybrid ROPO journey, and 80% wouldn't commit to a purchase without verified reviews.
What makes users choose Sephora / Zalando
Photos shown immediately in search results
Shades clearly differentiated, no need to click to compare
Visual shade comparison across skin tones
Clear, immediate confirmation when added to cart
What makes users choose Galeries Lafayette
Premium perception and brand legitimacy
Layout perceived as organized and "classy" (verbatim)
Content already exists (ingredients, description) ; just under-scrolled, not absent
Two of four "losses" came down to habit or a promo, not design
- "Online it's really just to find out what's new in their collections or products. But honestly, in general, I go to the store." - "I buy in physical stores because I'm afraid things won't fit right online"
Mapping her journey showed drop-off at nearly every stage: information overload early on, sizing anxiety during evaluation, and friction moving from web to in-store stock. Our heuristic analysis added more flaws: a misleading "in store" label, unclear color indicators, and dense walls of text. This became our problem statement: young women need to eliminate the risk around sizing and color online, so they can shop with total confidence.
Defining "premium” was harder than expected
One of the hardest parts wasn't research, it was agreeing on what "premium" actually meant in concrete design terms. To work through it, we built three versions of the page: one centered on fashion, one on makeup, and a freer third version with an anchored add-to-cart button and more breathing room throughout, for a more luxurious feel. Testing them side by side showed us premium wasn't one fixed formula, but restraint and space carried through all three..
A heuristics analysis
Concept testing
& A/B Testing
Placing the reviews
Placing the reviews seemed like an easy enough task. At first we wanted it on the right side of the screen so it wouldnt overcrowd the succession of information on the left. We also thought one star icon would be enough. That was the option we were leaning to the most. The other option was the opposite of it: placing it to the left with a line of five stars filled in according to the client’s reviews. AB testing actually showed that was the option testers prefered. Perhaps it felt more familiar to them to have it on the left, perhaps their eyes didnt need to travel all around the screen to get the needed information. Majority won and that’s the option we went for in the final version. In the product card however, having only one star shown was perfectly fine to them and needed no modification.
The evolution of the delivery and payment card
Another element that seemed like an eye sore was the delivery and payment information card. It was big, filled with text and stood out in the flow of the navigation. It needed to go! For that, we opted for different options: the first one was to take it as it was, and push it back towards the middle of the page. It just didnt feel “premium” to have this information straight away and in the eyes of the customer, it made more sense to look at the images first, the description second and only then, if the customer would think of purchasing the product, to have the payment and delivery information. The second option was to not rock to boat too much and just reduce the quantity of information in the given card and have more details afterwards in the accordeons.
These two options were presented in A/B test as well as the current version. When we asked our testers which one they prefered (without indicating which one was the current one), to our shock, almost all of them went for the current one, the one we despised. they felt the information was important and wanted to have all of it straightaway and werent bothered with the bulkiness of it. And so, that’s how we decided to keep it as it is and not do any useless modifications.
Designing the solution
We rebuilt the page around a clear typographic hierarchy separating brand from product name, and replaced dense text with accordion menus. Concept testing pushed further refinement: review placement changed twice before testers responded well, and when we tried moving delivery details further down the page, users actually preferred them right at the top, so we kept them there.
Search Flow
Product Page
Where this leaves us
Chefscue began as a simple question, what do we cook with what’s already in the fridge, and became a project that taught me to listen closely to what people actually said, not what we assumed. Every pivot, from reshaping the journey map to swapping a percentage for kilograms, came from that discipline. Designing for a small, everyday frustration reminded me that good UX often lives in the mundane moments we overlook.
