Shop Local at the Distillery District

The Distillery District is a commercial and residential district in Toronto well-known for its annual Christmas Market and its Victorian-era industrial architecture.

In recent years, changing consumer preferences for online shopping have put pressure on local businesses without an e-commerce presence. As a business improvement area with many small local shops, the Distillery District is particularly sensitive to these trends.

Project Scope

Website Redesign for the Distillery District

My Role

UX Researcher

Project Timeline

2 weeks (Oct. 2019)

The Challenge

We wanted to design a website for the Distillery District that would encourage people to visit the District more frequently and spend more on local businesses. The first challenge was that many don’t go to the District primarily to shop but to casually explore it. The second was that awareness of its online presence was low. The third was that this was my first proper design sprint and I was fumbling through the dark throughout the process.

The District’s existing website is fairly professional but also a bit bland. It seems to function primarily as a directory for the stores in the area. By contrast, visiting the District presents one with interesting sights, an inviting atmosphere and little nooks to be explored. Wouldn’t it be better if the online experience mirrored the in-person experience of visiting the District and encouraged a subsequent visit to the area?

Empowering Ideation

Early on, we had a lot of ideas before our research had gotten underway. To prevent them from sidetracking us, we created an ideas document to capture them so we could move on. Ideas weren’t discussed or vetted, this was simply where we could put all of our ideas without fear of criticism so we could move on and focus on understanding our users.

Listening to the Locals

Our approach was to interview those visiting the District and living near it to understand how they shopped and why they came to the District. Throughout two separate visits to the Distillery District, we targeted a combination of merchants, tourists and locals. We collected additional information through an online survey.

What we learned challenged our initial assumptions. Across all respondents, there was a two-thirds preference for shopping in-store, prompting us to pivot away from an e-commerce focused website. Despite this, merchants without an online presence tended to view having one as an opportunity for increasing their sales.

Taking a Look at the Competition

The District offers several advantages over comparable markets in Toronto. It has frequent events, and its biggest event, the Christmas Market, has high awareness. Its sense of history gives it a character and appeal that is unique in Toronto. It is also the only market among its competition to be completely pedestrian-friendly year-round. These same advantages came up repeatedly in our interviews with visitors.

The District does not differ from its competition in its lack of an online shopping experience. Some stores within the District have e-commerce websites, but these are independent of the District. It also falls short in affordability and it is perceived as more of a special shopping experience rather than a regular stop for most visitors.

Getting Personal

Our in-person interviews and online surveys provided us with plenty of data. Eventually, we distilled it down into four distinct personas. Our primary users are represented in Tami, a Toronto local, and Bob, a merchant at the District. We represented the goals of tourists visiting the District with Shu, one of our secondary personas.

Building it All Out

Equipped with an understanding of our users’ goals, it was time to rediscover our early ideas. While many were thrown out, we found opportunities to incorporate a few of them in modified form as small parts within the website. Some of what emerged from our heated debates were:

Merchant spotlight feature on the main page

• To bring attention to merchants looking for increased traffic
• To reinforce the sense of community valued by both consumers and merchants

Highlighted events on the main page

• To drive awareness and better reflect the many ongoing activities
• Locals cited events as a major reason for visiting the District

Individual shop pages

• To give visitors context for shops and highlight the most popular items
• To give small shops an online presence without being demanding of their time or knowledge

That’s not to say implementation went smoothly. Pressed for time and required to make countless small decisions, we had to prioritize features and have confidence in the iterative nature of the process to refine the design. Given how close I had been to the research, I was reluctant to let the designers make decisions without being plugged in to the users. However, for practical reasons, I had to give up on this. Like any process, part of it is knowing when to let go.

Future Opportunities

An “explore shops” feature

Most visitors to the District went simply to browse, so a way to highlight relevant places to check out during their visit could reflect this behaviour.

Increased functionality for store pages

With more refinement, our prototype could better highlight the potential of these pages and encourage useful feedback from shoppers and merchants.

A progressive web-app version

While designing for desktop and mobile was outside the project scope, building out a mobile website would potentially have brought to light interesting use-cases while also responding to the way people reported using websites generally.

More marketing of events

Increased marketing around upcoming events outside of the Christmas Market would encourage visits to both the District and the website.

Reflecting on the Process

In the end, it was incredibly valuable to push through the process. Design collaboration is incredibly difficult and without user data to provide some focus it would be next to impossible. It would have been beneficial to better leverage our users by getting more granular in our interviews and surveys. By better understanding online shopping behaviour we would have been able to make a more informed and considered design.

My takeaway is to learn from the process and move on. Fail-forward.