Goals

Design Goals

• To be able to help users of Jerry’s online shop have a better experience.

• Two week design sprint.

business goals:

• Have clear ways of locating specific products.

• Have a search results, product page and a product description page.

• Have an efficient way of purchasing one or more products.

• Steer customers toward popular products.

• Allow customers to contact the business.

For this two week design period I used the double diamond research method to build a solid understanding of what was needed in this site. I began my research with a journey map with a proto-persona that showed me what UX tasks as well as a general feeling of what the user felt while ordering from Jerry’s. From there I did c/c+ analysis to discover how the site performed against other e-commerce sites.

I did this through a feature inventory and a heuristic evaluation. The feature inventory looks at what direct and indirect competitors are doing to solve problems or just what is standard for most sites, like having a search bar to look through the catalog of the sites inventory. This showed me what were some of the key features missing from Jerry’s. Heuristics are standard practices that help see if a site is Learnable, Efficient, Memorable, Error management, and Satisfying to use or LEMErS for short. By using these two methods I discovered that Jerry’s was not very efficient, you have to go through categories on the side menu, then click on more filters and then you can use a search bar to filter content, nor was it easy to learn because nothing was like other sites so it was hard to remember how Jerry’s wants you to find an item not what makes the most sense to you, for example I looked for a flat brush which took I had to go through 4 pages before I could even look at the flat brushes they had.

With this information I went into user interviews. The user interviews were important because they showed why art hobbyists and professionals look for when shopping online or in person. The interviews taught me that most users bought things they had to restock online such as canvas, art pads, and brushes they already liked but for new brushes or pens they liked to go into the store and feel if it worked for them even if it took hours. Synthesizing this information into an affinity map made these patterns easy to see. Which led me into creating the persona Steve.

Journey mapping

A journey map shows where in the process a user is and their emotional state and where a UX tool can shed more light into an experience or have an opportunity to help a user. The journey map really helped me plan what UX tasks I needed to complete in the research phase. It also highlighted the problem areas of the experience was mostly navigating the site and looking for what to buy.

This is Steve’s Current journey of buying something at Jerry’s Art Supply. He runs into problems when arriving at the site and searching for supplies.

Affinity mapping and user interviews

User interviews are the backbone of any UX project who knows more about a problem then the people actually dealing with it. the user interviews showed me what the users look for when shopping for art supplies online as well as how they do it in store. It was enlighten to find that most users wanted to try products like a brush or a pen out before buying them but they also did not want to ask a clerk where the product was.

Takeaways

• Users were ok taking their time to search for right product

• Recommendations and brand recognition were key factors in purchase 

• Users did not want to interact with staff to ask for help 

• User usually browsed online for first time purchase and wanted to test product in store 

• Users more often bought same things over and over 

Conducted user interviews where they shared their experiences shopping at art stores as well as online shopping in general.

Compare and contrast 

The feature inventory was useful to see how other retailers solved for problems. It was also helpful to see what users were used to seeing on a retail site. The main point I learned from it was that the search bar’s

This is a LEMErS evaluation which is a standard test that is used to see how a site or app is doing in UX standards. This showed that the efficiency and memorability of the site needed the most work and were hindering the overall user experience by not using standard practices like a search bar in the global nav bar that let the user find what they wanted quickly. 

Site Map

Sketches

For the sketches I tried to generate as many ideas as I could caring more about getting a solution down then the quality. I learned from graphic design the more you generate the less work you will have to do later. This helped clarify the features I wanted to add that would help Steve when shopping at Jerry’s. He needed to see not only what products were on Jerry’s but also how much they are, favorite items so he can order them again quickly, and finally I made the search and categories more inline with how other e-commerce sites navigate. I then began to wireframe these ideas into a low and then a mid fidelity wireframes and made that into a working prototype for testing.

Prototype

The user testing showed that users were able to quickly find and add products to the chart and their favorite page but many users did not understand the correlation between the pages and how the favoriting system worked. They also were confused by the naming categories given by the card sort. As well as have a hard time distinguishing between relevant information. I would need to conduct another card sort and round of user testing after the design iteration I had already done. 

What I learned 

• Card sorts need to be clear in their objective and given more information if the sorters are not familiar with the subject, for example I received one data point where the tester added ⅗ of the items into one category called art supplies which was true but not helpful. 

• It is better to do one thing well in a design sprint then two things poorly. MVPs are a major thing for a reason in tech because they help you focus and design. The more your testing for and creating the less you can truly do to help a user.

• Always move from bad, good, better, best. Meaning sometimes you need to get something to a standard then you can add more to it as time goes on to improve it.