Kensington Market — for the Digital World

The Project
Task : The project was to develop a desktop website prototype using Figma for the Kensington Market in Toronto.
Team : Priya(Me), Rachel, Isabella, Diana, Taz
Tools : Figma
Background
Kensington Market is a neighbourhood in downtown Toronto known for its independent shops, vintage boutiques and arts spaces. The Market is host to a variety of grocers, bakeries, cheese shops and various bars and restaurants. Kensington Market was designated a National Historic Site in 2006. With more and more shoppers preferring to shop onine, it is important for normal brick-and-mortar stores to have an online presence that brings more customers to their doors. The Market has largely resisted becoming modern unlike the rest of Toronto. Its current website seems as dated as the market itself. The Project Team was given two weeks to design a mid-fi prototype for a modern website that will attract more shoppers to the market, increase sales in the stores and improve social media engagement.
Research Phase

We started the project with the research phase. We needed to collect data on the Market and some of its competitors. We created surveys for patrons and vendors. The project team walked around the market and got the surveys completed by both vendors who had stores in the market and the patrons who were visiting the market. The collected data was organized into affinity diagrams. The data showed that most of the vendors were not supportive of a digital platform to offer their goods online. They preferred to bring customers to their stores. Similarly most of the visitors had not seen a big online or social media presence for the market or its vendors and they preferred to shop directly at the stores. The competitor analysis showed that other downtown Toronto markets such as Distillery District and St. Lawrence Market were far ahead of Kensington in terms of online presence and awareness.
Planning Phase
Based on the data collected we developed two personas. One to represent the typical visitor/shopper and another for a vendor in the market. The affinity diagrams provided supporting information to shape each of the personas. User scenarios, user stories and journey maps were developed for each of the personas. As a final output of the planning phase, a high level site map was also developed.


Design Phase
The team started doing several sketches. Based on collected data and the output from the planning phase the team created many sketches to highlight different areas of the market. The hand-drawn sketches were then translated to mid-fidelity using Figma. The Home Page highlighted stories, vendor directory and history, with corresponding images. As the data showed that most visitors were there for the food options the team decided to highlight the various food vendors at the market.


Final Design
The final prototype was arrived at after multiple reviews and changes. It included designs for the Home page and six other pages. From the sketching phase the design highlighted the food vendors at the market. The final design had a Popular Items section that focused on the popular restaurants and food vendors. For each vendor the page included options to reserve tables and also links to food delivery service providers.


Click here to view the entire prototype
Conclusion
This project was a great learning experience for the team. With proper guidance the team was able to follow the user experience design process to revamp a traditional website. We learnt the importance of design being supported by data collected through research. And it was fun to design a website for a fun place like Kensington Market !
