Whisk is a kitchenware and tabletop store and e-commerce website that originated in Brooklyn, NY. The store has now expanded to two locations, one in Brooklyn and Manhattan.
Objective
With larger retailers in the industry, smaller retailers need to step it up by making some changes to compete.
My objective is to help design a new information architecture for Whisk’s website.
Personas
I was given specific personas to work with for this particular project. Roland is my primary persona, whereas Daria and Trung acted as my secondary personas. Although they are much younger in age and have different characteristics — they were both still considered in my research and design processes.
Research Process
Contextual Inquiry
I initially conducted a contextual inquiry and made a visit to the Whisk Manhattan store. There I was able to see the physical placement of products and where they were organized accordingly. Along with studying the products, I was able to observe the customer flow throughout the store and their purchasing actions.
After familiarizing myself with Whisk’s store, products, layout, and overall feeling — I began to conduct my next research in card sorting. We were prompted with adding 10 additional items to our list of 90 Whisk products. With the 100 products, I started my open card sorting research with 3 participants.
Card Sorting (Open)
Takeaways:
It was very interesting to test my 3 participants as I realized they all had different levels of expertise in cooking and baking. However, all participants reacted the same in terms of organizing the products by their ‘purpose’ and visualized their kitchen while sorting.
Card Sorting (Closed)
After collecting my observations from my open card sorting, I chose category names that I felt would help my new testers to organize the products more efficiently.
Takeaways:
I tested two new participants who actually had very little to no experience in cooking and baking. This was very beneficial in terms of understanding how a potential new user to Whisk’s site would react in finding a product. After the test, I learned that there were a few subcategories that were unnecessary and that it was possible to simplify the category names even more.
Competitive/Comparable Analysis
Takeaways:
I looked into 3 larger retailers in the industry and conducted an analysis in terms of what features they offered, their product discovery process, and their checkout process.
All retailers did a fair job in offering unique features that would capture their customer’s attention and incentives for them to stay on their site. As for product discovery processes — William Sonoma definitely stuck out in a negative way from the other two. The William Sonoma website has an overwhelming amount of information and could potentially make users abandon their site quickly.
As for the checkout processes, all retailers did a great job in minimizing the steps in getting to checkout. They were also successful in offering multiple shipping and payment options to cater towards the user’s convenience.
Abby Covert’s Heuristic Evaluation Checklist
With Abby Covert’s Heuristics Evaluation checklist, I studied how each large retailer’s flow process was in relation to each other.
User Flows of Competitors
Whisk Navigational Site Map
In studying the user flows of the competitors, I was able to create a new site map for Whisk that was more simplified. Keeping our persona, Roland in mind — I wanted to make the navigations as easy and comprehendible as possible.
Based on my competitor’s user flows, I was able to map out Whisk’s new and improved user flow. I wanted to keep it simple and straightforward for the user.
In studying IKEA’s user flow for their membership program, I was able to create a new user flow with just a few easy steps. I felt that this was very important to incorporate — as Roland was very interested in taking advantage of discount shopping.
Wireframe Work
Wireframes and Annotations
All wireframe work was designed with the considerations of my primary persona. I wanted to create a very clean layout that was also very concise and left little room for error.
After designing my wireframes, I placed them into Invision — a prototyping resource where I was able to connect all pages together and add clickable actions.
Whisk Prototype Link:
https://invis.io/ZT7VZPBAH#/172040667_Home_Page
Usability Testing & Design Iterations
Takeaways:
I had a few minor functional issues in terms of maintaining my click areas. My testers also pointed out that the shipping estimating tool was overlooked during my checkout process due to its placement on the page. Overall, my participants felt that the layout of the website was simple and straight forward.
Next Steps / Final Takeaways
Short Term:
I will continue to make more functional edits to my pages to create smoother flow for my users. I will also initiate more usability tests and collect more feedback to establish more improvements. Lastly, I will wait for my client, Whisk’s feedback in terms of what they thought of my new IA design.
LONG TERM:
I will analyze better solutions to categorize products more efficiently after more research and testing with users(experienced and inexperienced with kitchenware and tabletop products).
I’d like to also include a live chat customer support system to the site. This would be beneficial for new and current customers to get in contact right away with any comments or questions they may have.
Lastly, I will create site versions for the tablet and mobile app so that users can access the Whisk site when they are not on their desktop.
