UX Case Study: Redesigning The Dymocks Online Experience
The Brief
Our team of three were tasked with the redesign of the Dymocks online website whilst paying particular attention to the websites navigation. Our redesigned Dymocks website would only house 50 products, which were made up entirely of books.
Contextual Inquiry
The first step along our journey was to pay a visit to Dymocks’ physical book store on Collins Street and undertake relevant observations. From our time in store, we were able to determine several potentially important insights.
- The stores layout and the hierarchy they allocated to book categories
- How varied the book categories were
- How the store provided a lot of prominent space for gifts and stationary
- How customers were unable to order books in store to be later delivered to their home address
User Interviews
Having visited the physical store, our collective minds turned to wanting to understand the potential user of our, soon to be redesigned, Dymocks website. We discussed our key areas of inquiry that we would want to cover in our user interviews and then set about creating our question base. Not all users would necessarily be asked every question, we were very much hoping to use this as a guide in what we would hope were more conversations that interviews.
Our key areas of discussion were as follows;
- Users shopping habits
- Users online habits &
- Users reading habits
From here, we were able to conduct a number of productive user interviews, each of whom would hopefully provide some collective insights.
During each user interview we also observed how they operated a user task on the current Dymocks website which gave us an important insight into how the majority of users favoured using the search bar function for a book, even if they were not entirely sure how to spell it.
Affinity Mapping
Now that each team member had collected the main points from each of their user interviews we began to synthesise our results within an Affinity Map. This allowed our team to visually show any similarities between the differing user interviews which in turn allowed us to begin considering our trends and key insights. It became clear to our team that we had one overwhelming insight shine through from our research but decided to take down both our primary and secondary insight.
Primary Insight
Users were not reading as much as they wanted too, often finding reading ‘a chore’
Secondary Insight
Users were often frustrated when either their searching or purchasing experience proved more difficult than it needed to be
Our team then began discussing our two insights and what problem statement this may lead too. This guided our conversation to how that could then shape our development moving forward and ultimately, our deliverables.
Despite our research’s overwhelming social issue with users becoming ‘bored with reading’, we all came to the conclusion that to resolve this issue would take our team beyond the scope of the case study. We therefore concluded that we would be better suited focusing on our secondary insight. After much discussion, this lead to our eventual Problem Statement…
Problem Statement
“How might we make the book searching and purchasing process more convenient for our users”
Having formed our problem statement we set about forming the solution statement that would guide our journey into the development phase.
Solution Statement
“A redesign of the website with an emphasis on navigation to ease the searching and purchasing process”
With both our problem and solution statement defined, we set about putting into place a number of key activities that would allow our team to perform some rapid ideation and begin collaborating towards our final solution.
Feature Prioritisation & Card Sorting
Two such key activities we decided on were activities that would allow our team to truly focus on the navigation of this newly designed website and how that might look (card sort) and the features we would hope to include in our final design that would be staying true to both our problem and solution statement (feature prioritisation)
Card Sort
From our card sort it soon became clear that even with only 50 books in our product list, there was still a huge amount of information to display as these books covered an array of categories. One decision our team came to pretty early on was that if we were to improve the navigation we needed to simplify the navigation. We quickly reduced our primary navigation down to two options — Fiction & Non Fiction.
Our card sort took many forms as we attempted both open sorts and closed sorts but each time coming back to the conclusion that Fiction & Non Fiction would work in this scenario and that we could realistically find a way to bolster our secondary navigation to perform the really heavy lifting for the website.
This bore the idea for the MegaNav which became a pretty prominent idea moving forward. Our thinking became that if we simplified the primary, we needed some way of displaying a large amount of information in a snapshot to provide clarity for our users at the next level.
Feature Prioritisation
With our team being happy with the card sort, we moved onto a Feature Prioritisation Matrix so that we could determine our MVP.
It became pretty clear that to remain in line with our problem and solution statement, the features that rose to the top of the pile were that of ‘searching’ functions and ‘quick add to cart’ functions. There were an overwhelming number of features we could look too in order to build this website however our team wanted to remain focused and consider what should truly be at the heart of the design and build from there.
Wireframes & User Testing
Moving fully into solution mode our team began putting together a multitude of wireframes as we began to build out our design.
We decided pretty quickly upon the design for the header which included our simplified primary nav and something we wanted to ensure was featured on every page, a very prominent search bar.
We learnt very quickly to fail fast in our design and to be constantly reiterating as we go. Once we had a few screens together we would conduct user testing to determine what worked in our design and what did not. We would confer as a team regarding the previous design and set about improving any areas that needed improving.
We all managed to see first hand how well the MegaNav tested with our users whereas some screens that added unnecessary steps in the purchasing process really did not work.
With the MegaNav working so well, this was also tested and reiterated to what became its final solution for this case study with the prominent book categories having their place on the left half of the nav, and the home page ‘specialised’ categories taking up the right half of the nav. This as we hoped, allowed our team to portray an increased amount of information at the secondary level in a concise and clear way.
Clickable Prototype & Final Solution
With our team managing to get a nice strong visual idea of how our design would work, we promptly moved into creating a digital version. This again was rigorously user tested so we could continue to refine and improve how our design worked.
After many iterations, we are very proud to present our final design with our team collectively being very happy with what was successfully achieved.
Please Click To View Our Prototype
Further Development
Having presented our final solution, our team were able to reflect back on a hugely successful project but also begin to consider where we would take the product if provided with further time to do so.
One area I would have been very keen to research further would have been that of our Primary Insight from our initial research and how our…
Users were not reading as much as they wanted too, often finding reading ‘a chore’
One idea I would could see potentially having an impact on that would have been introducing a ‘Loot Crate’ style subscription model for Dymocks where users paid a set fee and in return received a crate of Dymocks products every say 3 months. The crate could include any from their diverse range including books, DVDs and/or stationary items. Perhaps the thought of having the items picked for you and delivered on a routine basis might encourage users to find reading exciting again. It would of course require an additional round of research and synthesis to determine if this would be a viable option. But it would have been a very interesting area for me to discover.
Our other areas of further development centered much around further functionality of the website and areas we didn't necessarily get chance to fully explore. Ideas such as…
- A Functioning Wishlist
- Ebooks
- Live Chat Help
Reflections
Looking back, our group of three were able to reflect easily on what was most definitely a job well done in an area we were all very much new to given this was all of our very first UX Case Study/Project.
The biggest reflection we all had was that of the domino effect and how that can affect the time management of your project. In hindsight we were able to ask ourselves did we definitely ask the right questions during the interview process and if so, did we burrow down on the answers provided as much as we could have?
We couldn’t help but feel that had we maybe gotten a bit more out of our interviewees then we may have had a greater variety of insights or less of a social outcome. That in turn could have let to a smoother design process and potentially allowed for more to be achieved.
We decided not too be to harsh on ourselves as this was our first venture in UX and I am especially proud of my team that we could, in hindsight, see areas we could strengthen on for the next project.
Meet The Team
Daisy Tsen
Daisy was a complete rock for our team throughout the entire project. Something I am completely thankful for.
Aaralyn Lim
Aaralyn was a constant source of motivation during our entire time in working on our project.
Connect With Me
A big thank you for making it this far and for reading what I had to say. I welcome any and all comments/questions and am especially happy for you to connect with myself.
Until next time…
