The Scooter Lounge
During my time at Utah Valley University, I enrolled in a class focused on Content Strategy. Luckily for us, we were given the opportunity to work with some local clients and help build their content. My group members and I wanted to help bring some of our digital media skills to a local scooter (moped) shop called The Scooter Lounge.
The Scooter Lounge has been servicing the scooter community in the Utah Valley area for many years. Whether that’s having a great stock of scooter inventory to sell, providing repairs and general maintenance to scooters as well as selling scooter parts all across the nation.
Their business practices were tremendous and had hundreds of great reviews from their clients, they only lacked one thing… an up-to-date website. We know how important it is to do business not only in a brick and mortar store, but online as well. We saw a lot of potential and opportunity to give The Scooter Lounge a content strategy face-lift.
We were able to schedule a face to face meeting with our client and listen to his needs, wants and future goals for his company. He clearly knew that the weakest link in his chain was his website and wished to focus on improving that section of his business. We all believed this was the right move and knew it could greatly help him serve more people in the community.
At the close of our meeting we discussed potential outcomes with our time during the semester and what would be a reasonable deliverable for him. He was delighted to hear our ideas and we were excited to get to work.
As a team we agreed upon redesigning his entire website to look more modern, have a great user experience and great content strategy. We would provide a style guide, component library and both mobile and desktop surface compositions for him. Our goal was for him to give these designs to a developer so he could get his newly designed website published on the web, ready to take on more business.
OUR PROCESS
First and foremost, we met as a team to go over the constraints of the project, and conducted research on other motor scooter websites to see what were the best practices to organize this content online. We knew that the 3 primary sources of business for The Scooter Lounge was:
- Scooter Sales
- Scooter Repairs
- Scooter Parts
After getting a good idea on what would be beneficial for The Scooter Lounge, we went to sketching numerous amounts of layout designs for the home page on whiteboards in our classroom.
We walked away from that team exercise feeling pumped and eager to put pen to pixel and design some real wireframes. Although, there was one slight issue. The next week when we came back together to show off our designs, they weren’t consistent at all. We all had varying ideas on what to do for the home page and style of branding.
Here is the first iteration of my design.
After much conversing back and forth we realized we forgot to start with a foundation, being a style guide and component library. We spent the next week coming up with a cohesive branding guide to help us in our future iterations. This is what we came up with:
Now we didn’t get here overnight, throughout the weeks we would reach out to the owner of The Scooter Lounge just to update him on our progress. He was really easy to work with since he trusted in our ability to give him a great product. He felt like we knew and understood his vision for his website and company. This made our time working as a team more enjoyable and smooth sailing from here on out.
Because there were plenty of pages to design, we divided the different sections of the website 3 ways so that each member in the group had a section to design. We could achieve this method since we took the time to create the branding guidelines which would result in cohesive pages across the whole website.
Last but not least, I’d like to give you a glimpse of how everything turned out!
Here are some examples of our Desktop Screens.
It was also very important to The Scooter Lounge to have a mobile friendly website.
In conclusion, My team members and I had a great time working on this service-learning project. We were happy to give our services to a local hero and we also benefitted from growing our skills as well. I look forward to The Scooter Lounge’s future and wish them the best in their plans to enhance their online pressence and content strategy.
