Distillery District Upgrade
I don’t know shit. During this UX project, I’m finding out that design is just that. You don’t know anything until you’ve done the research. I don’t normally go to the distillery district, but when I do, I’m eating. I’m not buying anything though. This is the problem the distillery district has. How do you get people to buy these cool products?
Closing the Gap
There’s a gap. Most of the world is online, but the distillery district is a physical place. How do we use the internet to drive more traffic to the physical location of our wonderful artisan vendors? Our small group of design students decided to give the website a makeover.
Ear to the pavement
As a group, we conducted research to find out more about how people interact with the distillery district as well as the distillery district as a whole.
Have you seen the Distillery District site? It’s actually pretty good. However, nothing is perfect and we found gaps in the site.
- No artisan vendor information?
- No reviews?
- No interactive Map!?!
From the above analysis, even Eaton’s Centre has an interactive map. How am I supposed to find my way with a 2D map!?
And the Survey sayssss
Even though we could see a couple of gaps, we wanted to hear straight from the people and by people, I mean both the vendors as well the general public.
We created 2 different surveys so we can get an accurate point of view from both sides.
What we found out from the vendors is that;
-66% agree that a good marketing strategy will help
-38.5% have an information website
69.2 % of their own discovery come from word of mouth.
Can you see a trend? If you can’t they’re holding massive signs saying “ HELP ME!!”.
So help we shall.
We built a diagram from all the responses we received from vendors and themes started to form as well as persona.
- Vendors want more exposure
- Vendors say that the quality of the product is their selling point.
- Lack of resources to reach their target market
Iorek would very much like to increase his revenue but is frustrated about the current marketing plan and has limited resources to develop an online presence.
Don’t worry Iorek, Red Academy UX design to the rescue.
But before we move forward, we still need to know what their market thinks. We deployed an online survey to find answers and from the answers, a persona formed as well. Meet Frederique Cadeau.
We found out a couple things from the survey;
Problems:
- Local shopping associated with high prices
- low inventory
- crowds
Opportunities:
• Give the user the information they need to have an efficient experience once they arrive
• Create transparency around deals
• Offer other avenues for engagement with vendors
As Frederique, she wants to engage with the vendors so that she feels closer to her community downtown.
Distillery District sketches
We took what we learned from our research and tried to apply it in a meaningful way.
The front page starts with a video!! This is so people can view the experience of the distillery district and get them excited to come into the district. We installed a promotion carousel to highlight deals from the vendor as well.
The vendor page which we created now has all the information you need for the vendor!
-Hours!
-Promos!
-Instagram!
Frederique can now finally find and interact with Iorek without leaving the comfort of her home until she’s ready to grab one of his limited edition pieces. Then she’s running to the district for sure.
Is it usable?
We interviewed a couple of fellow students to find out their opinion about our website and see if the website works in the way we intended and surprise, surprise, it does!
A few minor adjustments on design but they loved the flow of the site now.
Future consideration for the site could be that they can add e-commerce as a way of leveraging online traffic.
All in all, this was a great experience learning about the distillery district. It was even cooler learning about UX design that can go with it.
