BACKGROUND

Crash matt climbing is an e-commerce website for a small business that sells rock climbing equipment with their main product being a hand care balm.

The Problem

Uncover the current pain points of the original website and produce solutions to improve the overall user experience.

PRODUCT OVERVIEW

The challenges

• The current website appears untrustworthy and unprofessional.

• The website currently has poor traction and needs an increase in the website click-through rate.

• Better cater to users’ needs as a small business.

The solutions

PROJECT PROCESS

Double Diamond Process.

DISCOVER

RESEARCH

I conducted an interview and moderated usability study containing 5 participants. The main objective was to observe their thoughts, actions and behaviours while completing tasks on the current website. I encouraged them to speak aloud as I observed them navigating the site. I noted vocalised struggles and non-verbal struggles detected through body language and facial expression. I also prepared questions prior, to gather as much insight as I could to improve this service.

The research goals:

• What reasons lead people to shop online instead of in-person shopping?

• How often do people repurchase items online?

• How can we build trust between small businesses and customers?

My main focus was on the last question which included User Testing…

What struggles do users come across when using the current Crashmattclimbing website?

DEFINE

SYNTHESIS AND ANALYSIS

Within my findings, I located common pain points users experienced while using the current site. 

I created a graph that portrayed how many of the users had difficulties with individual tasks and an affinity diagram to organise the common themes I came across during the interview. This allowed me to clearly note down the pain point that needed to be addressed.

INSIGHT

• Only 1 participant didn’t get stuck after adding an item to the cart, whereas the other 4 repeated this section of the flow out of confusion

• Although there was a chat feature, 4:5 were left frustrated having to wait 3 - 5 business days for a reply and weren’t able to find further means of communications

• 2:5 participants would recommend the website to friends and family…out of politeness

SEVERITY SCALE

I categorised the themes of my finding using a severity scale.

Overall the website at its current state didn't completely prevent users from completing tasks but was met with slight difficulty, resulting in no high severity findings. 

DEVELOP

AI

My goal here was to make strategic information architecture decisions that would improve overall website navigation. The structure I chose was designed to make things simple and easy.

PAPER WIREFRAMES

The home screen paper wireframe variations below focus on optimizing the browsing experience for users.

DIGITAL WIREFRAMES

Moving from paper to digital wireframes made it easy to understand how the redesign could help address user pain points and improve the user experience. 

Prioritizing useful button locations and visual element placement on the home page was a key part of my strategy

ITERATION

Because I felt like I was running out of time, I ended up rushing, trying to fast track the end product. I moved on from lo-fi wireframes to creating mock-ups and hi-fi wireframes. I felt like the end product wasn’t in line with the company’s brand and failed in many aspects in terms of design.

I gathered feedback from other designers and inspiration from other eCommerce sites and made iterations of my design. I redesigned my digital wireframe keeping some elements and discarding others, all while keeping users at the focus of my designs.

After approving my redesign I conducted my first round of usability testing.

DELIVER

Mockups