STRAND BRAND

Already onto Week 4?! It’s been nonstop research, wireframe, test, and iterate, here at GA. Project 2 is now complete and I am exhausted, but lets dive into the process.

PROBLEM

We were presented with the fact that big retailers are clobbering small retailer’s websites, so we had to design a new version to keep up. We were also given three personas to work with but had a “main” one to focus on.

It was difficult to always take into account all three personas because their “tech empathy” ranged from low to high and their shopping cycle was either immediate buyer or long thinker. Basically, we were designing for a wide range. As we got into card sorting and user flows, it was easier to extract key pieces from each persona and focus on a specific part.

RESEARCH

Competitive/Comparative Research

I started doing user flows for the competitors’ product lookup process and checkout process to see how I could improve upon the final design. I realized that the process for both competitors could be shortened greatly by limiting the amount of options and extra steps that the user has to go through.

INFORMATION ARCHITECTURE

Card Sorting

Open card sorting yielded really interesting results in that there were many categories that I didn’t even think of adding. It gave good insight as to what was absolutely necessary and what was just there based off of personalities.

The open sort helped me start grouping categories together and creating more subcategories for different items and I was able to create a global and secondary nav from that information. The takeaways were that I didn’t have enough subcategories under the “Home+Gifts” section, namely the “bags” and that “audiobooks” didn’t have a home yet.

It was easy to just add subcategories under the global nav and create an audiobook subcategory under the “book” panel. (In the end, it’s still a book that you’re listening to.)

WIREFRAMING

I was able to take everything that I got from information architecture card sorting and apply it to create a final global navigation and secondary nav that you see in the homepage. The footer is set because of all the contact information that needed to be surfaced but not immediately present.

The big takeaway that I got from competitor comparison was the flow of checkout. I wanted to limit the number of steps it took to complete checkout, and limit the options that were available to customers. This allowed for a smoother flow and a better experience overall.

TAKEAWAYS

Next Steps

I really want to focus on the mobile aspect of this project because the persona we were given really likes to purchase items off mobile, so building out that side would be really interesting. There are a couple of other features that I would be interested in looking into as well, such as membership, gifting, and a spoiler review section.

This project was important because it gave us a chance to see how the architecture of a site is formed and structured.