Background & Challenge
ShopStreet was a small start up company with the aim to become a review based platform for brands rather than products. Some of the challenges they faced included their difficulty in conveying to users what service they were providing. They also struggled with building customer engagement and reliability. I was the only UX/UI researcher and designer and was therefore involved in each phase of the design process.
Project Details:
Team:
CEO, Marketing, Front-end & Back-end Developers
Timeline:
3 Months, weekly meetings with marketing director
Tools:
Sketch
CEO, Marketing, Front-end & Back-end Developers
Timeline:
3 Months, weekly meetings with marketing director
Tools:
Sketch
Process
When you have many business requirements and constraints, a systematic approach is paramount. The best way to describe my approach is through the lenses of the double diamond model developed by the British Design Council. The model breaks down the design process into two different types of thinking:
Divergent Thinking
Think broadly, keep an open mind, consider anything and everything.
Convergent Thinking
Think narrowly, bring back focus and identify one or two key problems and solutions.
01 Empathize
In order to understand the problem in more detail, I reviewed research and data that the ShopStreet team had already collected through previous surveys, interviews, and user testing. I was unable to perform my own due to the time and financial constraints of the company. I summarized some relevant takeaways below that allowed me to eventually focus on key problems and solutions.
Takeaways
ShopStreet Users
Unique
These customers are looking for niche experiences and want to patronize brands that have a compelling story, unique branding, and quality products. They want to feel like they ‘discovered’ every brand they buy.
These customers are looking for niche experiences and want to patronize brands that have a compelling story, unique branding, and quality products. They want to feel like they ‘discovered’ every brand they buy.
Engaged
They are curious and proactive in their approach to finding the right brand. They’re open to new information and willing to do the work to get it.
They are curious and proactive in their approach to finding the right brand. They’re open to new information and willing to do the work to get it.
Resourceful
They do their research and expect their research to point them in the best option.
They do their research and expect their research to point them in the best option.
Demanding
They expect quality brands to deliver quality products & experience — and they’re vocal when the brand doesn’t deliver.
They expect quality brands to deliver quality products & experience — and they’re vocal when the brand doesn’t deliver.
Community Minded
They want to crowdsource collective wisdom, and share their own with fellow members.
They want to crowdsource collective wisdom, and share their own with fellow members.
How Might We Statements
1. How might we make ShopStreet's mission clearer to potential users?
2. How might we encourage users to write reviews?
3. How might we increase user engagement?
02 Define Goals
I conducted a heuristic evaluation with these question statements in mind in order to define our goals. I defined the following 3 goals which would provide me with solutions to the problems we were facing.
1. Re-design ShopStreet’s website to ensure mission clarity.
2. Draw users attention to writing reviews.
3. Improve customers’ experience browsing through brands by specifically addressing relevance, engagement, and personalization.
03 Design
Through redesigning the homepage I was able to refocus the mission of the company for our target population. I also managed to make small changes during the redesign that encouraged users to write reviews. This included emphasizing the "write a review" CTA button as well as placing it throughout the homepage under each trending category. I also adjusted the brand cards to take up less space but provide the same amount of information with a clean and readable hover (or flip on phone). I did this in order to lower the emphasis on the brand and instead to bring more emphasis to the reviews.
To read comments in depth click here.
Before
After
04 Prototype:
In order to create more engagement and a more relevant user experience I built an extensive autofill search as well as filters sectioned by brand values and categories. View a clip of the prototype that focuses on these two solutions.
05 Test
Due to the lack of resources and time constraints user testing with a prototype was not an option. We directly updated the live site with these changes and did testing using hot jar. We saw an increase in users shortly after we launched this version.
Next Steps
Unfortunately our startup had to close due to unforeseen circumstances therefore we were unable to collect data and reiterate to learn about the impacts of the UX/UI design process. While this project launched I started working on my next task which was to create a more engaging brand page experience.
