Debenham Inspires
A mini site which inspires customers in home decor
These past few weeks I was tasked with creating a mini site for Debehnam’s here in London, which focused on providing design inspiration for customers. In addition to helping inspire, I needed to help customers choose their design style, plan and execute on their home design projects, all while managing to stick to a budget. A tall order in such a short amount of time, but definitely worth the effort.
I received my client brief and personas at the beginning of the project and immediately set out to validate both. Since I’m new to London, I knew that finding potential users was going to be a challenge. So I took to my Facebook community of friends to find people who were interested in home decor.
User Interviews
When asked, “Where do you find inspiration for home furnishing or decorating projects?”, 100% of participants use both Houzz and Pinterest for inspiration.
“When I asked why those sites specifically?”
”I easily find lots of room ideas in my style.” — Nikki, Seattle
”I’m in love with Houzz. Their site shows you what pieces to buy to replicate the room style.” — Jessica, Seattle
Persona: Midori
Midori is a 29 year old Graphic Designer who seems to be the persona most inline with the people I interviewed. She cares about modern styling, and different cultures. She recently moved into a new apartment and her current focus is finding and executing on a look for her living room.
She has a lot of design ideas, but struggles with knowing where to start, and really how to create the look she wants. She wants help in planning her design plans.
The Competition
I also set out to do a competitive analysis. What I found wasn’t surprising. Brick and mortar stores like Debenham’s and John Lewis don’t have much as far as an online presence for home inspiration, etc... Houzz — which every user I interviewed visited regularly was by far Debenham’s biggest competitor. Why a competitor? Although they don’t sell products directly, they provide inspiring looks and provide customers with best priced items from third-party retailers to help them with their goal of creating beautiful living spaces. The one differentiator Dereham’s has that Houzz can’t compete with is — people want to be able to feel the products and see things in person before purchasing.
The Opportunity
- Inspire Customers
- Guide customers with choosing a design style
- Guide customers through planning & budgeting based on their inspirations
- Allowing customers to create and share wishlists
- Quick and easy online purchasing
IA, Site Map
I initially did a card sort of 100 cards related to inventory items Debenhams sold. I then took this process online by using OptimalSort and was able to recruit several more participants in this exercise.
In the initial open sort, I was able to see a pattern in how the data was organized, and came up with a list of what I thought would add consistency to the categories. I then proceeded to do a closed cart sort. In closed card sorting, participants receive a set of cards with individual inventory items and are given categories in which to sort them in. This was extremely insightful. Not only did it validate what categories were good and bad, it also helped identify additional potential taxonomies. For the sake of this project, I opted to keep things simple and stick with one taxonomy.
In the end, the site map looked like the image below
Concepts, Sketches and Wireflows
A wise man once shared with me that he concept maps to just get everything out of his head. I tended to write everything down as an outline. Once he explained the method do his madness, I fell in love with concept mapping. I find myself doing it all the time now — even on the same pages where i’m mapping out user journeys, and wireframes. Thanks Jon. :)
I also took to sketching and wireframing with the hopes of user testing. My problem however was that before I went to test my concepts I realized that I wasn’t exactly adhering to what the end user needed help with — which was not just finding a style, but actually planning her room design. I had really nothing in my sketches to help her plan.
So I literally went back to the drawing board and rethought my concepts to include project planning. In the end I was able to pull together a solution that was more closely aligned to both the client and Midori. I went through more sketching, and really straight into digital wireframes and a prototype. I was able to test my prototypes. There weren’t thankfully any glaring issues. I had concerns about whether or not it would make sense to a user about whether or not it was expected that all items would get added to a project once created from an inspirational room. Everyone seemed to get that and it was deemed exceptable and expected behavior.
Next steps
Fix inconsistencies with number of items getting added to both the project and cart
Test with higher fidelity to determine if the toggle is intuitive for non GA users
Give Madori more context to LG, MD, SM
Improve the shopping cart experience — where a user is at