Experience Kensington
A UX case study for e-commerce in Toronto’s Kensington Market
I’m studying UX Design at RED Academy, after a more than a decade as a editorial designer. This is the case study for my second project, Experience Kensington.
The Opportunity
For this project, my team’s challenge was to delve into the culture and ideas of Kensington Market’s shoppers and vendors, and to explore options for a viable entry point for e-commerce within the market (via desktop website).
Research
We put together in-depth interview questions for Kensington’s vendors, hoping to discover who they are, how their businesses were doing in the face of substantial online competition, what their goals are and how they are going about attaining them.
We also drafted a 5-minute survey for shoppers to find out who they are, what brings them to the market and what channels we can use to reach them.
Vendors: Old School vs. New School
We were able to interview 18 of Kensington’s 240 fabulous, fractious vendors, finding that they fall into two loose groupings: Old School and New School.
The Old School vendors have been in the market for decades (averaging 21.2 years), created the ‘cool’ that permeates the place, are mostly family businesses or micro-businesses with older owners who are very tech resistant, and have limited goals & plans for their business beyond keeping the doors open and food on their table.
Trending GoBeyond.ai articles:
- An Annotated Reading List of Conversational AI
- Getting NLP Ready for Business
- 83 Experts Share the Best Ecommerce Conversion Rate Optimization Strategies for 2018
The New School are younger, ambitious business-builders who are in Kensington to capitalize on the “cool”. They’re relatively tech-enabled and are usually small businesses who haven’t been around very long (averaging 5.3 years), with a handful of employees.
Shoppers: “We get all kinds.”
In talking with vendors we heard over and over that there’s no ‘typical’ customer in Kensington, that they get all kinds of people. In surveying shoppers, we proved it: 57% were from Toronto, 28% were from the surrounding area, and a whopping 14% were from other countries (and that doesn’t take into account the tourists who declined to be surveyed because their ‘English is too bad’).
The big draws for shoppers were the unique grocery and ingredients shopping, fashion, the restaurants and cafés, art and artists.
Looking into the locals, we found found strong trends toward wanting to support local businesses, loving Kensington’s unique offerings and wanting to explore the new food experiences that are cropping up there.
Serious Challenges
Then we ran into some real barriers, both with vendors and shoppers:
91% of vendors — on both sides of the Old School/New School divide — spend a grand total of $0 a month on marketing, online or offline. They’re dependent on the market itself to draw customers and don’t have a backup plan for when things get slow.
When asked about their feelings on selling online, 89% of the Old School vendors responded Negative or Mixed.
73.5% of shoppers say they’re Not or Only Mildly interested in shopping Kensington’s stores online, preferring the real-life experience of being there.
But…
There were some bright spots for us:
55% of Old School vendors and 77% of New School vendors use social media to promote their businesses and products.
88% of Old School vendors and 85% of New School vendors feel positive about a market-wide website to promote their businesses.
Our Play
We decided to immerse our users into the Kensington Market experience, both online and in real life, allowing them to explore in a way that’s tailored to their interests and needs.
We’d tease shoppers with the richness and variety offered by the market’s vendors and then offer tours to explore all the incredible places they might not find themselves.
The Competition
We dove into the travel and tourism space to find sites that were doing it right:
Planning
The two-pronged approach meant that our site structure would look something like this:
Visitors would enter via the home page and have the choice to find out more about Kensington’s history, explore the vendors through their assigned categories (Cook, Style, Eat & Drink and Art) or book a tour that suits their interests (based on our personas).
Design
Sketches
We workshopped some ideas but came around to the idea of an experience-forward, image- and video-heavy design, to drive the users’ desire to see it all for themselves.
Our pages would all feature large hero images, but the biggest and boldest would be reserved for the Home page (a full-screen video of a walk through of Kensington during Pedestrian Sunday, with everyone in full festival mode) and the Store Zoom (a full-screen view of the interior of the shop with rollover-activated hotspots that highlight the store’s unique offerings).
We’d also integrate (curated) Instagram posts hashtagged #ExperienceKensington on the pages to give the real flavour of the place. On the store pages, vendors could use these slots to promote new merchandise and drive sales in a similar way to how The Store on Queen does (https://www.instagram.com/thestoreonqueen/?hl=en).
Wireframes
Version 1 Prototype
https://invis.io/NJOMV4J7B3T#/326193415_Front_Page
Usability Testing
We tested Version 1 of the site on four individuals using a task-oriented walk-through (contextual inquiry), followed up with a post-experience survey. We learned that:
- The Home page needs to serve all users (more visual content, information and points of entry for each distinct persona)
- Headings are inconsistent & less than friendly (need to fill out the text for wayfinding and feel)
- Secondary navigation needs to be cleaned up and directly related to the content following it
- Spacing needs to be consistent site-wide (it became distracting)
- We don’t need a Trending section for the Category pages (it was getting in the way of the secondary navigation)
- We needed to make CTA links more obvious
- Users didn’t use or understand the the Zoom View on the Store Feature page, so we killed it in favour of making the owner and story more prominent.
Version 2 Wireframes
Version 2 Protoype
https://invis.io/NTONX9R9YJC#/326490806_Front_Page
For the second version (after a several explorations of our navigation), we think we have an easy-to-use site that uses information about Kensington Market’s vendors, their events and their promotions to draw in new visitors from near and far, with the added option to extend that into a real-life Kensington experience through guided tours.
For vendors with limited tech skills, getting their latest promos in front of our users’ eyes is as simple as adding a hashtag to the Instagram posts they are already making, extending their reach in a significant and immediate way.
Summary
Kensington Market is in a constant state of flux, so as older merchants give way to give way to young upstarts, opportunities will arise for e-commerce integration. We really hope that the character of the market will be passed like the proverbial torch to the next generation, because we love it. Stay weird, Kensington!
