Forbidden Planet

E-Commerce Design & Informational Architecture

For the 2nd project of GA’s User Experience Design Immersive, my classmates and I were tasked with creating a prototype for a local NYC store’s e-commerce site using informational architecture.

I was assigned Forbidden Planet, one of the world’s largest and most acclaimed sellers of comics, graphic novels, toys, and exclusive collectibles. In addition, we were asked to design in mind of a key person (or potential shopper). Forbidden Planet’s persona was Trung: a single parent of a 12-year old girl who cares about navigating easily, browsing new items, viewing product ratings, and shipping & returning items.

Off I went for 2 weeks to dive deep into the subculture of Forbidden Planet with Trung’s (and his daughter’s) needs in the forefront of my design.

Research & Findings

Contextual Inquiry

My first mode of attack was to visit the actual Forbidden Planet store, get a feel of its customers and employees — the users, and also of the environment.

Upon arrival, I was stunned with the amount of items, however there was clear signage around the store pointing shoppers in the right direction. Also in the front of the store was a computer navigator. It was a digitized cartoon map of the store. Users could interact with it and find their items by clicking the marked sections of the store. I knew I wanted to use that navigation as an inspiration for my design — the easy to use, simple nature of it.

“I come here mainly to browse.”

I spoke to one user who told me all about the browsing culture of the store. He would walk in when he had free time to look around with no item or task in mind. How could I replicate this for users online, I wondered?

“I know they have what I’m looking for.”

Another user talked about their reputation for carrying the hard to find items. A “Feature Items” category immediately came to mind, as well as easy navigation to find those tricky items. With my notebook in hand and ideas buzzing in my mind, I was ready to take a look at the competitors and other reputable brands for further research.

Competitive & Comparative Analysis

While searching on the internet, I was able to find 3 direct competitors of Forbidden Planet. The first was Toy Tokyo, a speciality toy store in NYC. The second was Midtown Comics, also in NYC, and lastly, I chose DC Comics, a giant in this particular world.

I spent time looking through each of their websites to get a feel, as well as see what features they had. I evaluated their product discovery, checkout, and return flows. I chose return since I knew it was something Trung cared about. DC Comics scored highest out of the 3, and I consider their best features in my own design.

I also took a look at Apple and Banana Republic, 2 of Trung’s favored brands, as well as Amazon — given its reputation, especially for returns and shipping. I added the MOMA Design store, as well, because they have an eclectic variety of items, like Forbidden Planet, and I have purchased from the store in the past — both online and in-person.

I decided to take a deeper dive with Toy Tokyo and Midtown Comics (given that they’re both NYC retailers with a similar customer base, carrying similar items) and Amazon (given its giant status and direct competition to smaller companies). I used Abby Covert’s informational heuristics to perform an analysis on product discovery, checkout, and returns.

From my rating system, I was able to see that Amazon and Toy Tokyo had a number of good qualities that I’d incorporate in my own design.

I walked through each flow with Trung’s needs in mind and was able to use these experiences as I set off to prototype.

Card Sorting

Before I started designing and prototyping, I needed to see how people would generate their own categories for the 90 products (+10 I added) from Forbidden Planet through an open card sort.

I chose 3 users — 2 of which were familiar with the brands, items, and cultures within Forbidden Planet, and 1 who had very little knowledge.

I got some great research and input from my card-sorters. For example, one user talked about how important t-shirts were for the average customer of Forbidden Planet — I decided to add t-shirts to their own category within clothing. Another talked about how customers might prefer to view the site by brand versus item.

After my 3 open card sorts, I went back to the drawing board, synthesized the new information, and came up with categories and subcategories to be validated (or torn apart) during the closed card sort.

My 3 users for the closed card sort, all had little to no knowledge of the intricacies within Forbidden Planet. Trung, our main persona, isn’t familiar with all the brands — so I thought their fresh eyes would be great for this exercise. 2 users were confused by some of the language (i.e. figurines), and 1 user preferred broader and fewer categories. I took this all into consideration when sketching out my first prototype.