BRIEF
Research user. Redesign direct-to-consumer e-commerce website. Replatform existing site from Magento to Shopify.
Project Overview
TIMELINE
3 months
TEAM
Kevin Regan, Tina Rubin
DELIVERABLES
User Research, Visual Designs, Prototypes
TOOLS
Sketch, InVision, Photoshop, InDesign, Acrobat.
PROCESS
Heuristic analysis of existing site, content audit, competitive analysis, technical audit, visual designs and prototypes.
MY ROLE
User Research, Information Architecture, Wireframe Selection, Interaction Design, UI Design, Visual Design. I was the sole designer on the project.
Research
This project started with research. I focused on three things: user research, heuristic analysis of Briggs & Riley’s existing and a competitive analysis of the ecommerce experience for luggage.
Competitive Analyis
My competitive analysis focused on a feature by feature comparison of Briggs & Riley and three of their competitors. Deliverable was a gigantic spreadsheet. This analysis informed my design recommendations and was synthesized into the final visual designs.
Heuristic Analysis
In this redesign and replatform project we started with Briggs & Riley’s existing ecommerce site. I did a heuristic analysis of the site, which was delivered to the client in a heuristic mark up of the site. This deliverable, always useful as a discovery exercise, gave us a concrete reference place for discussing proposed design changes with the client.
User Research
My user research efforts focused primarily on deep diving into Briggs & Riley’s user-generated content. I collected expressions of user desire and concern. I synthesized these data points into the user persona. This image was a useful tool for explaining design decisions.
Design
In order to contain costs we limited wireframing to theme selection. To this end I also proposed that we start the design in Shopify by fleshing out the selected theme, seeing how far we could get. I then took this work, screengrabed it, imported this into Photoshop and Sketch to finalize the designs. Protoypes were built in InVision from this work. Approved protoypes (and the work I had started on the Shopify platform) were then handed back to development for the final build.
There were two reasons why I suggested this approach. I needed a crash course in Shopify. I decided it was important that I understand how the admin panels work, what their capabilities were, how they would be adminstered. My hypothesis was that this understanding would lead to more cost effective designs. And that it would also jumpstart the development.
