Bringing digital to Toronto’s Kensington Market

In my first week after moving to Toronto, I made three stops to Kensington Market. Once for their tasty tacos, once for hard-to-find Italian ingredients, and once more for a caffeine boost. A sharp contrast from the city’s skyscrapers, the market brings together an eclectic mix of shops and services. The experience can be described as whimsical: you walk in with a certain expectation, but walk out finding something unexpectedly delightful.
The opportunity
My favourite spots at Kensington Market have all had their doors open for at least a decade. But with all the talk of the death of brick-and-mortar business, I wonder how the proliferation of e-commerce has shaped the market.
Research has shown that Canadian businesses have a weak online presence, thus, are particularly susceptible to the increasingly digitally-savvy consumer that researches and compares products online. The market is made-up of virtually all independently-run, local businesses. The opportunity to bring digital to the market became forefront to my curiosity.
Will bringing digital to Kensington Market help ward-off their susceptibility to the impacts of e-commerce and help increase profits?
Preliminary research
Working together with three other student researchers, we set-out to learn more about the people of Toronto, to glean insights on their behaviours and preferences with the ultimate goal of effecting positive change on the stakeholders (consumers and merchants) of the market.
We conducted research in the following ways:
- Inspected the current digital presence of the market
- Conducted surveys of residents and visitors of Toronto
- Interviewed customers and merchants of the market
- Compared current digital solutions that help drive traffic to Kensington Market and its neighbouring markets
Current digital presence of the market
We visited the current community website for Kensington Market, looking specifically at the (1) ease of discovering new places/experiences in the market, and (2) the depth of information provided.

We soon realized there was much to desire, as:
- The website is outdated and visually unappealing
- There is little depth of information on events and places within the market
With such a weak official online presence, we wondered how people become aware of the market. We turned our research to the people of Toronto.
Insights from our surveys
We deployed an online survey to glean insights on the people of Toronto — focusing on:
- Demographic information
- Methods of discovering new places/events to visit
- Shopping and dining behaviours
- General experience and awareness of Kensington Market
Key insights gained from the survey include:
- 66% of respondents prefer to do most of their shopping in-person (rather than online)
- 88% of respondents are supporters of local businesses
- The majority of respondents have visited the market, and learned of it through word-of-mouth and social media
- 64% of respondents visited Kensington Market to eat
- The majority of respondents were not aware of events in the market
We then turned to the people of the market to learn more.
Interviews of customers and merchants
We visited the market to interview customers and merchants of the market. As we gathered a large amount of data, we performed a card-sorting technique to better visualize trends and common groupings.

Our customer interviews revealed similar insights as what we found on our online surveys. For our merchant interviews, we learned that:
- The majority of our interviewees have operated in the market for over 10 years
- Events in the city and the market are the biggest influencers of foot traffic, followed by seasonality (winter is a low season)
- Merchants rely on their current customer base to supply the majority of their business
- Instagram is the most popular method of marketing, and the majority of merchants find their efforts to be at least somewhat effective
Comparison to other digital solutions
With the market’s current community website lacking in dimensions described above, we looked to other digital solutions:

In looking at the website features of our direct and indirect competitors, we learned that Kensington Market is currently lacking in providing an informative and easy-to-use repository of information.

Users and audience
With the insight we gained from the people of Toronto, the stakeholders of the market, and looking at the online presence of competitors, we realized an opportunity to revamp the Kensington Market website that allows for users to both discover new places and be informed of the market’s offerings.
Based on our research, we created the following personas that could benefit from our website redesign:

Design of the offering
After the research process, we quickly got to work on creating sketches towards our website redesign.

This was an iterative process in which we each conceptualized ideas of the website based on our research, came together to discuss individual pages and elements, then going back to the drawing board. We reached a conclusion and began creating a working prototype.
Discovery page
User needs addressed by this page include:
- This is the landing page that provides users with snippets of the market’s offerings, providing access points to shops/services, gift card purchases, and stories written by community members
- Shows popular categories that visitors care about most, and trending restaurants that help guide users in discovering new places at the market.
- A search feature to quickly find shops/services by name, feature, or other attribute.
Places and merchant details
User needs addressed by these pages include:
- Helps the user discover new places within the market by providing a deep list of the market’s offerings based on popularity, its features (e.g. Wi-Fi, vegetarian options, cash-only, etc.), along with an interactive map.
- The merchant details provides information on the shop’s offerings, its location, hours and contact information.
- Uphold the importance of keeping users informed of the history of the market by showing what else may have occupied the location of the store throughout the market’s history.
Events
- The website intends to provide an updated listing of events at the market, with the option for merchants and members of the community to submit event listings.
About and history pages
- Gives users a snapshot of the current and past of the market
- Allows users to dive deeper into the history of the market by dragging an interactive timeline slider to view images and descriptions of the market’s past
- Provides directions and answers to frequently-asked questions
Gift card
- Users can ‘give the gift of the market’ by buying gift cards for themselves or others to spend at the market. This idea was inspired by our merchants telling us the notion of keeping the dollar within the market and the important role that regular customers play.
Stories
- Stories bring together the community, from merchants to customers in publishing experiences and upcoming gatherings. This was inspired by the patron’s lack of awareness of events in the market.
Usability testing
After development of our prototype, we performed testing of our website with 5 people. We conducted this process by asking testers to perform specific tasks. While we experienced a very high success rate with our testing, we were able to identify the following key changes to our prototype:
Users had trouble identifying how to submit a new event to our Events page
- Problem: The ‘Submit Event’ button was placed too far down the page.
- Solution: Upon moving the button on the top of the page, we found that users had a much higher success rate of finding this feature.
Users had trouble identifying whether an action was submitted successfully.
- Problem: There was a lack of success modals that prompted users whether an action had successfully went through.
- Solution: Upon creating success modals (i.e. animated buttons, screen prompts), users were able to better realize successful actions.
Bringing digital to Kensington Market
Our website addresses the needs of the stakeholders of the market that we identified during our research process. Customers are now able to research merchants online, and discover new places and events with ease. Merchants benefit from the greater information of their offerings, the gift card functionality, and the ability to submit story posts that showcases the delight that underscores their business. Lastly, both customers and merchants can benefit from the sense of community that the website provides.
In the future, we hope to integrate direct interfacing to the market’s merchants, by allowing them to update store information (e.g. updated hours of operations during holidays) in real time, providing users with richer, more accurate information.
