The Distillery Brick Road Story
After burning through the first week of class at Red Academy UX design professional, we were quickly pushed onto our second project. Unlike our first, this time it was a group project of 4 members. Our assignment was to assess one of three markets in the downtown area and create a ecommerce solution for them to help them boost their sales. The assignment was to be released for a desktop browser.
After grouping up with my fellow members: Rebecca, Vivian, and Juhi. We took a quick glance at the choice of markets we had before us and decided on the Distillery District. Rebecca had never been to the Distillery and we were deciding that it would be beneficial if we all took a look at what we were getting ourselves into.
When we arrived, it was rather cool being -5 degrees Celsius with some wind picking up. The alleys were rather empty and we thought it would be rather hard to gather any interviews in such weather. But since we were there we tried our best and managed to scavenge a few from some locals that were on their usual daily walk with their dogs and some store owners before closing. That night we launched our online survey for their general online shopping concerns, habits, and values. We quickly gained 50 surveys replies and closed the survey because of time constraints and needed conclude our first round of our research.
With a few interviews and sizable survey sample down in 2 days we felt pretty good on our outreach research. We of course personally wished we could gather more information but we had to sum up our findings to match our schedule for the due date. What we found was in general, online shoppers value quality goods and a competitive low price for the item they were buying. They mostly worried about items not being true to their online descriptions or pictures and lack of customer support for questions and return options once purchased. The trip to the Distillery and interviews showed us the area was mostly targeting people with higher quality or unique items in mind. A strong emphases on customer service because of the owners being in store and being a tourist area.
The problems we could identify were that the pricing bracket was rather high and there was no real marketing help from the Distillery District owners. The store owners mostly had a online presence in one form or another, but the range in the experience and quality of the sites ranged from Facebook pages to quality online ecommerce stores. The Distillery District website did little justice for the atmosphere or experience the physical location provided.
We gathered up our data and put up an affinity diagram that produced 4 personas which we thought would be all the likely possible users of our platform. We compared the Distillery’s website without high scaled shopping locations such as Yorkdale, Holt Renfrew, and Toronto Premium Outlet. All which had a clean layout like the Distillery’s but lead a much higher standard to the content and interaction.
Storyboards, flow chat, scenarios, stories, and user cases where pumped out with the vast amount of data that seemed to accumulated at our feet. Then our first group meeting for a recap of our status at the end of our first week came. We might have came off with the idea trying to please as many people as possible with our many personas. The amount of work we had done during our planning phase was probably a lot of work that didn’t need to be done if we focused on our primary persona. With some advice from our teachers we decided to provide a more focus experience for our primary persona rather than perhaps what might have been a watered down version of what we should have done.
With a focused target in mind we now where on way to figure how to fit all our researched in our design. Some of our research was a little bit irrelevant as our original idea of e-commerce and target persona was changed during our meeting. We reformed what we thought was relevant and repackaged the deliverable. Targeting a fashion connoisseur persona the product would be would be packaged to cater to a person who was looking for a quality unique items which would overlook the pricing. Something that was inline with the Distillery’s market.
We put our flow chart up on the scrub board and drew up a hybrid site map to help visualize the actual screens and flow of the user interacting with the site. It helped members realize what would be needed in each page better and a better feel of what the overall sense of the site was going to be. Having spend some time reassessing our target and reassuring our goals before we moved on , it was nice to see our actual product on the board in some detail. We could see the finish line. Though time was getting close to the deadline.
The wire framing came pretty quickly with all of us wanting to do our part (though it would bite us later one). We had our first prototype done and it was simple, but inconsistent as we had different styles of what we wanted and spacing for everyone was different. We had the same header or footer, but the main part of pages would vary. Me and Vivian ended up doing the clean up as time was short and having everyone redo their own pages might just end up having us double check everything anyways. With some QA down. We were pleased with our prototype to let it be tested.
The response was average, many users needed context of how things were being use. It was usable, and many users thought it was good for what it was. Though they didn’t see the true underlying mission. The prototype still lacked the cohesion that a tuned website had. It’s ability to push our ideal of telling a story of the vendors and the district was lacking in our layout. Grid formats and having a slightly text heavy design didn’t go well with our high quality and unique story telling we wanted. We took our front page’s design of mosaic of stories layout and applied it to the rest of the pages to give the feel of a magazine. Tuning the nav bar’s lackluster naming to something more in tune with the story telling theme and fixed more of the spacing issues we came up with our final product.
Our Invision Prototype: https://projects.invisionapp.com/share/RZA6PVLJ4#/screens
We managed to finish the final version of our prototype only the day before the presentations. One of our members was away for the day as well. We had to build up our presentation during our after hours. We split up our workload up in four parts with each person responsible for each phase of the project. I was responsible for the research. There was very little time to do anything really polished. Figuring what to put in the 10–15 minute presentation was hard enough with less than 4 minutes for each person to talk. I figured though a research was a big part and tried to rush though as much as I could as it was the research that pushed us down this path. Visuals where something I really wanted to put in the presentation but time didn’t allow for it. I tried to follow our theme of storytelling and try to lead the presentation though a story of how we started our process, it would not last though the presentation but at least would grab the attention of the viewers from the start at least.
After the presentation, I was glad to hear the overall good reviews from our teachers. We had a very poor slides to accommodate our own speeches but we stayed true to showcasing our process which seemed to shine out bright. It gave me a second light on the process I believed to be very natural. Research facts that leaded to a logical plan. Everyone in our group of course was still learning and still was very hands on every part of the project. Perhaps if we split the work we would have done better or effectively, but something about walking with my peers step by step down the path as something I don’t think I would want to take back. Very much like Dorothy walking with her 3 newly found friends down the golden brick road. We supported each other through every trial learning ourselves and teaching when others they needed the help. That’s a UX design experience worth experiencing again if time permits.
