Project 3 — Main St!
The opportunity
- create e-commerce site to supplement in store sales
- increase online engagement
- increase value of main street
- increase social media engagement with main St.
- provide the ability to shop from home
Main street created a website that acts as a directory with some blog posts. RED Academy gave me a hypothetical to expand their pages to include an e-commerce store. Basically one encompassing web site for all main street shops information and retail. I was tasked to create an e-commerce site to supplement sales due to significant market loss to online giants (however had to make sure the commerce component was a compliment). Not only create a possibility of facilitating sales, but increase that possibility of sales at every possible point. In turn increasing brand value of Main St to accelerate sales as the site is launch/operating. Specifically one method we were to include was social media, such as online transactions (shares, likes, comments). Other methods were to be determined.
The brief
- $1.6 billion projected loss to the (mostly international) online market
- increase trade deficit
- labour and service decrease
- local brand value loss
- Canada’s online spending to increase 50%
$1.6 billion loss for the economy because of the failure to take a digital approach to retail. This increases trade deficits due to the lack of positioning for Canadian products and selected products. Either by shipping to different markets decreasing margin of profit and decreasing funding for ideation or failure to properly monetize. Failure in strategy allows accelerating labour loss and service decrease. Not only does it shrink the present market, it fails to set up the future market for Canadian products. Through facilitating and building brand environments we can position for projected increase Canadian consumer spending and open more doors for international entry.
My Thoughts
I think e-commerce is pretty genericized and focuses on utilitiarian innovation rather than the context of the environment. We haven’t really been able to fully digitize a virtural destination for shopping centres rather creating an online shop facilitating sales and innovating search. Such as click behaviour feeding data into suggested matches for purchase, or decreasing cost for the user.
What is Main St? Something unique and experiential! Probably not definite in its environmental structure of what it is, however it is unique in experience like a travel destination. It is not easily transfered into a website by simply transferring colour palates and items into a digital interface but I think it requires context. Not only the context of the items and street environments of how it is produced but why it is produced. I think higher level actions taken by users and producers reflect their experience, environment, and social context. Behaviourally people may not be fully aware but the emotionality of design intention results in the emotional remainders from experience. I think greater design and thought in product the greater the resulting experience interpreted emotionally.
I think to create something usuable and facilitating, requires a built contextual experience. Creating an experience focused website that balances the needs of stakeholders and increase the number of stakeholders naturally.
The research
Survey
- One stop shoppers
- Experiential
- Students
10 people I surveyed was from my facebook account. Many were classmates and the others were general facebook friends. I was expecting a demographic of ~24 year old female student respondents because a large proportion is that demographic. Which I found out to be true but older (25–28), and was reflected in brand choice and age response.
People liked online shops having unique goods with utilitarian interfaces. There was not many specific stores (malls, winners, thrift shops) that they shopped at physically, indicating that general users (general shopping population = facebook population) preferes shopping where everything is located in one spot.
What was interesting was how they described Main St. Many didn’t know what to expect when going to Main. This hinted as being something deeper. I think it may show that Main is contextually different than a Mall. For instance there is Walmart but why are there other groceries stores. Its about why do people go to Main st at all and why is there a market for Main St rather than everyone defaulting to Walmart. I found 70% of people surveyed would go more than 5 times a year to Main St. 70% would travel more than 30 minutes to get food and >5 people surveyed takes more than 20 minutes to get to Main St. Meaning that the population looks for experiences and would go to Main st with out knowing what to expect.
Interviews
The 4 people I interviewed were friends that I knew and was not surveyed. Generally they were female and 23, students or transitioning from students. They care about friends, family, meeting new people, eating good food and finding relaxing experiences. There is also a willingness to pay for more of an experience than strict commodities.
Competitive analysis
- Apple — Store products have a story, complexity and unique design, evangelicalists
- Bureau of Trade (Bought by ebay) — Products are highly selective and has their own story but product purchase is located on a different website. Image is strictly rustic and masculine. Simular model to Banana Republic’s old catalogue.
- New Shop Main — Randomized experience with more variety. Replicating Main St stores.
- Other competing websites with stories connected to the product have online retail farther removed meaning the greater amount of clicks and increasing possible bounce rate.
Persona
From the surveys and interviews, I developed a persona of Christina Basseri. The persona drived the mood board, feature development, and level of complexity for the Main St website.
Ideation
To create an experience that makes a sustainable difference, I thought about what defines an experience…. I think it comes down to social context.
Look at this pendulum. If this was built in someones backyard and provided safety procedures not alot of people will want to take it for a spin.
However when someone offers you a ride on a Micky Mouse carnival swing most people will, because of the built social context. Either through a context built by Disney and or strengthen through the social context of friends and family.
I decided to replicate this experience with Main St. Building the context with writing and stakeholders around the community to create an identity.
One key information from store owners were that they couldn’t index all items. I think this works for the benefit of the experience. Limiting the selection gives the opportunity of curation; the choice of unique products that reflect the store. Not only selected products but produced products that reflect the area. Hopefully stirring up friendly competition and accelerating and increasesing identity of the area. This should be helped with authorship.
When reading novels we can be transported into something contextually different from reality but still be tied to it through our past experiences. By increasing investment in the story (product), that when we watch it on film we seem to be offended due to the contradiction that we have in our mind. When we give this context with a product, selected product, store, it strengthens identity of the product as if we understand, but creating our own context around it. This is derviative from visualization excercises of happy experiences, it allows people to create their own context of what is happiest and stimulate themselves. Hopefully it gives a unique shopping experience that not only describes one store/product but the whole community in concert.
Advocates and community
By giving student writers the ability to write in the voice of the store for an product, creates adovacates that allows for the community to self generate and sustain. With involvement of the store owners and writers interacting bilaterally with shoppers strengthens their relationship. Simular to Apple and their evangelicalists generating word of mouth. Maybe to generate an identity and strengthen it by uniformity the students should write consistently according to the store image to ensure brand power after a product has fallen out of fashion.
Information Architecture
The prototype
In creating the prototype I added social media tags and shares with reviews and ratings according to the persona. The facebook tags positioning increase visibility due to brand value next to the article names. Pages were made very short to decrease cognitive overload. Also the tile randomization text had to be reduced to decrease cognitive overload. When pointers are over the tiles it should be responsive and show text describing the product or store or event. Styling is from the brands that the user described they bought such as Lululemon, American Apparel, and Forever 21.
The summary
This project was pretty fun, and I increased it to high resolution/low resolution. I think in the future I would enjoy working on projects that closes the gap of technology and the real world.