Redesigning Dekoruma Product Website — UX Case Study
Dekoruma is home and living startup located in Jakarta. Its service consist of property search, Interior Design service, and Home product service. This UX Case study is made for redesigning furniture product part of the website for my first ever UX Case Study.
Disclaimer : I didn’t work for Dekoruma so I don’t have any data related to why the decision in the website is chosen. Dekoruma team has delivered a very good solution to the website which I can learn a lot from and I don’t intend to give any recommendation for using my design for Dekoruma.
GATHERING INFORMATION
USER RESEARCH
I talk with several people with interview for how would they like to buy a furniture. Most of them preferred buying in offline store that they could really feel the quality of the product, feel the texture of the product, and feel the dimension of the product. What most offline store doesn’t have is the diversity the product gallery, usually online store have more choice in their gallery. This is also backfire that many users feel that they are overwhelmed by the choice.
Then I ask what determined their criteria for choosing the furniture. The first one is the price, next is functionality, as in how much it takes space, what do the product do, next is overall aesthetic of the product, this means how the product blends with the overall concept of the interior, the the later two switch in hierarchy based to the user. Sometimes, user is heavily influenced by the inspiration they find on the web for choosing the furniture product.
What my respondent like about the offline store is also the pace is in their control, sometimes they just go around without something in mind and if they find something cute or they thought they need it, they will buy it.
When I ask why they go to website, apart from having no time and just don’t feel like going out, they found that going to website makes price comparison easier as they could just save the page and compare it side by side later.
Then I do the usability testing to 6 people :
The task I asked is simple, going around the product page and try to find something you want from it.
Unfortunately, when I ask for exploring the Dekoruma website, they feel uncomfortable exploring the page. They say, it’s easy if you go for the product that you already know, just go for the search, boom you find it! But if you don’t know how to choose what product do you want, it can be quite a problem.
Then I ask why would it be a problem, following answer would be summary of the usability testing and interview :
- Filtered product is not consistent and changing overtime, sometime they take me to something really different, just like a new website, but it’s nice to have some information on how to choose the product. But I wanted easy and clean navigation.
- I like the feature of the photograph and there’s a dot, when you click on the dot they tell you the specific product. That way I could see how the furniture is located in the room.
- It’s hard to choose which one I want to buy. Maybe the cheapest one but I’m not sure.
- When it comes to furniture, people do not get familiar with the name, there’s one occurrence that user misspell the name of particular product, instead of “rak baju” what he types is “lemari baju”.
SITE MAPPING
One of the problem when I do usability testing with the user is that they find that the information on the web is too cluttered. They feel like jumping from one point to another when searching for product.
PLANNING
User Persona
While the general user use price, function, and aesthetic as their primary thing for choosing the furniture (age 25–30, middle income), I found that there are two kind of user in terms of how they discover what they want to buy. There are two types of persona that I develop.
The first one is the Lukin Yakin, the one who knows what he wants and want to see little options for his needs.
The second one is Yayat Liat, the one who just wants to look around to furnish her newly bought house, she’s open to opportunity and look for the exploration inside the web.
Design
- The search section will have more elaborated suggestion
This will help user see exactly what the product is before clicking the page. - I reduce the content on the landing page, instead of brand-focused, I try to change the experience to finding the product first, then filtering it by the brand. I hope this will increase the discoverability of other products.
- The landing page is the first impression, giving user overall understanding of what you can do in the web, company statement, marketing, promos, etc.
- The product page will separate the page based on product category. Each category will have their own page, for example, kitchen will have their own page. This way information on for example, “kasur” page can be further explored. While this menu would have many options, dropdown menu would cut the time for searching the category.
- The room page will provide inspiration provided by Dekoruma Team, each photos will have furniture detail and how much it costs. The room page also feature its furniture without disrupting the view on the photograph.
- I will add the page dedicated for discounted items. This might help user who wants to buy based on what is discounted. Get the chance before it’s gone, right?
Let’s provide the skeleton to see how it would look like
Early Feedback
I got a feedback from senior designer about the project, some of the comments are :
- Great approach in using the dropdown menu, but about the product in-dept, what if the information needed is more than 2 slots? Are you going to enlarge the page, why don’t you make it on the right of sub-category? You will get more extra real estate and the information will not look too cramped. I believe there would be so much information and sub-category on kitchen section, though.
- You should also make room gallery page and product gallery page.
- In the inspiration page, you should consider letting the user “collect” their favorite item not only “buy” maybe they want to compare it later.
- Maybe you need title on the Inspiration Page Detail so user will not get lost at the page
Now let’s see how it looked like
I try to keep the UI as close as possible to the existing website while doing a little bit of clean up to some elements.
Product Discoverability
Finding Inspiration
Learnings
This is my first ever UX Case Project, I believe there might be many flaws . But I learned a lot from stripping the existing website and develop it from what user find troublesome.
Self Reflection
- There’s a little voice in me that keep asking “Is this really answering the problem that you find?” But I decided to move on anyway.
- Adobe XD doesn’t yet have all the feature to do some gesture. Sorry folks, no working prototype this time.
- Instead of doing many options (I have brainstormed it, but I didn’t wireframe it), I choose the answer based on what I see fit, not based on data (I should be doing A/B testing to some of the feature), this is bad process.
- Still a long way to go and so many things to learn. Not only in the design itself but the product development and strategy.
Thank you for reading this far. I am currently actively looking for a UX Designer job, so please kindly contact me at aditamafikri96@gmail.com :)
