Case Study: Kensington? More like Kensing-FUN!
For my second project at RED Academy, Gabe Morillo, Sucheta Mehra, and I were tasked with creating an e-commerce solution for Kensington Market. Kensington is a Toronto landmark that is a unique blend of art, history, creativity, great food, and weird people; but their web presence was drab, outdated, and essentially useless. As the project commenced, we visited Kensington to re-acquainte ourselves with the market. We took this opportunity to interview shop owners and employees about their current web presence/e-commerce situation. We found that many stores already had a thriving online store so we began to think of e-commerce differently in order to achieve our goals.
With that in mind, my group wanted to see how Kensington Market stood up to similar establishments. What would a great website for a market look like? We gained further insight into the nature of Kensington Market by doing a a Heuristic Evaluation and Competitive/Comparative Analysis.
The Heuristic Evaluation compared the websites of the Distillery District and St. Lawrence Market, during which we found that the Kensington website had relatively low scores in clarity and understandability.
The Competitive/Comparative Analysis with Bunz and Camden Market pointed to similarities in demographic (young, hip people) and a strong feeling of community. However, Kensington’s web presence was very poor in comparison to Bunz and Camden.
Survey Time
When we were crafting our survey, our main objective was to figure out:
- Who went to Kensington?
- Why they went to Kensington?
- And what did they do there?
We designed our questions to give us some demographic information, such as age and occupation, alongside other quantitative info like how often they visited Kensington, how much they’d typically spend per visit, how they first heard about the market, and of course whether or not they liked the market. We also asked them to give us qualitative information such as why they liked or disliked Kensington, and what sets Kensington aside from other markets. We received many responses to our survey and the data confirmed our original assumption that community was important to the market’s identity, but it also gave us some new information about what users valued (like the Pedestrian Sundays, good food, and people watching). We surveyed 105 people with the first iteration.
We found that most of our respondents were between the ages of 20–39. We distributed the survey to our Facebook friends and the Toronto sub-reddit so the sample size was skewed. The next day we tweaked some of our questions to include:
- More options between the ages of 0–19
- A Meet Friends option as a possible response to the “why do you go to Kensington?”
- In response to “How did you first hear about Kensington?”, we changed Toronto Tourism to just Tourism and added a Search Engine option
After these changes we also posted the survey to the U of T and George Brown sub-reddits and got 22 additional responses. Here are some of the things we found out:
We found that the vast majority of those surveyed enjoyed going to Kensington. So we knew that they had a positive experience once they were there.
That 61% of people heard of the market through word of mouth indicated that they were not finding out about Kensington through their website.
We also learned that people don’t go to Kensington very often. 42% said that they only visited “sometimes”. If they’re having so much fun there, we should try to get people to come by more frequently.
To summarize the qualitative data we drew from the survey, I pulled out the most recurring words used to describe why our participants liked Kensington Market. To view the complete results, go over here!
As we could see, the main draws are the food and shops, with a lot of emphasis on community, people, atmosphere, and the unique vibe of Kensington. Another recurring thread was the mention of Pedestrian Sundays, an event held once a month from May until October, in which the streets are closed to traffic and there are outdoor events and an arts market. Users remembered these events and everyone we reached used positive language to describe their experience with Pedestrian Sundays. We thought we would dig deeper on that subject while getting in touch with a largely absent demographic.
Gabe wrote and conducted interviews with 3 George Brown students, with some questions pertaining specifically to the Pedestrian Sundays. Here are a few quotes we drew from those interviews:
“…streets are narrow so the cars take up a lot of space”
“Pedestrian Sundays in the summer are awesome.”
“I walked into a restaurant but there wasn’t any seating so I left, but still found a place at Kensington.”
“If it were entirely pedestrian it would be even more magical”
Clearly, there was a lot of love for Pedestrian Sundays. However, some issues arose regarding available seating at restaurants and crowded, narrow streets. From all this data, we felt that we had a firm idea of our users needs and it was time to make a plan.
Planning Time
Using an affinity diagram, we began to create personas, scenarios, user stories, and use cases to better visualize the problem, empathize with the user, and strategize the solution.
These exercises helped us personalize the data we collected and begin to visualize our users. After some brainstorming, we settled on 3 personas: Raul the Latino Photographer, Sarah the Arts Student, and Andrew the Tourist. Each of these represented an important aspect of Kensington, but for simplicity’s sake we chose Raul as our key persona.To illustrate Raul’s original experience in Kensington, I drew up a “before” customer journey map.
Raul has some severe pain points with the current state of Kensington Market, such as using the Kensington website, navigating through crowded streets, and waiting for a table at a restaurant. We knew we could help.
It was becoming clear that Kensington needed a website that was easy to use and provide clear information to help users find their way through Kensington. We also wanted to increase and promote events that drew people to the market, like Pedestrian Sundays. So we introduced Pedestrian Fridays.
We propose starting Pedestrian Fridays because it would:
- Entice “sometimes” users to go to the Market more often
- Clear the roads of dangerous and disruptive vehicles
- Run every Friday from May until October
- Feature street performers and/or musicians in the community
- Provide more room for people to walk
- Create a new venue for local artists to show and sell their work
- Boost Kensington’s reputation as a Market for nightlife
- Provide a more frequent and accessible alternative to Pedestrian Sundays
This idea wasn’t enough to fix Kensington’s problems entirely, but it was a good start. We used the whiteboard to decide on which features we could use to help the users get the most out of Kensington.
Prototype Time
Through rapid low-fidelity wireframing we began to get an idea how all these features would look together. We needed to reflect the spirit of Kensington that people found so appealing, while keeping things simple and easy to use.
We didn’t use the mobile-first approach simply because we hadn’t learned about it yet. Which is a pretty good excuse. We also began to nail down our taxonomy so we could move forward on the same page.
Next it was on to mid-fidelity wireframes and user testing. We went through several iterations of this as well in response to the feedback we were given through user testing. We reached out to our fellow students, friends, and family to try out our prototype and provide feedback such as
- Font too big
- Alignment issues/Layout Inconsistencies
- Fix Checkbox/Map taking up most of page
- Icon placements/Common Area/Spacing
- Pagination not clear
- Eye-tracking
- Negative Space
- and so on…
Click here to view the full prototype
As you can see, everything is perfect now. And if we check back in with our persona, Raul, his life is looking much better thanks to the new Kensington Market website.
Closing Time
The current site is bland, confusing, and shockingly out-dated. For the new Kensington website, we wanted to create a smoother experience and showcase the qualities that represent what the market means to the people who love it. Though this project was only two weeks, we made progress in pulling the Kensington Market website out of the internet dark-ages and into the sun. Shine on, you crazy diamond!
