As a team of five, we were responsible to researched and redesigned the website, Art Supply Warehouse, to improve the user interface and user experience for potential users.
5 Designers/Researchers
School Project
Sketch InVision Screen Recorder Google Drive Slack
User Interviews User Surveys Cognitive Walkthrough User Testing
Art Supply Warehouse (ASW) is a store located in Westminster, California, that sells arts and crafts supplies. The ASW website is meant to be an online interface that their customers can use to buy supplies from anywhere. Problem: There appears to be a limitless number of usability issues to work with. Their website provides no indication that they have employed any type of research into usability. As such, this website became the perfect redesign project.
We compared Art Supply Warehouse to five other companies that sells arts and crafts materials to get a better understanding of the advantage each company has. Two direct competitors (Jo-Ann, Michael's) due to the same target audiences and two indirect competitors (Amazon, Walmart) due to the ability of selling cheap and affordable art materials.
We created user personas to better understand who the users are, how they behave and what are their needs. Example: Nick is a senior at the University of California, San Diego majoring in art. I want to focus on Nick because he is a broke college student and tries to find the best quality of art supply while staying within budget. He and other ten thousand college students who also are pursuing in the art field could be potential customers for the Art Supply Warehouse.
We performed user interviews to gather qualitative data on the key factors an online shoppers is looking for. There were a total of ten interviews conducted. Each interview was thirty minutes in length and consisted in part, of personal questions regarding age, employment, place the participant grew up and education. The other part dealt more with attitudes and behaviors with respect to technology and online shopping habits.
We conducted user survey to gather quantitative date on the general experience and habit of an online shoppers. The team received 24 responses. Those received via Facebook were anonymous and random. The questions consisted of a few specific demographics, such as age, gender and frequency of online shopping. Most of the survey asked the participant to rate various online shopping behaviors and attitudes.
We ran a cognitive walkthrough to check and evaluate how well the website’s interface suits the user’s needs. A cognitive walkthrough will be executed while analyzing each step the user takes in completing their tasks. Criteria that will be considered during the walkthrough will be an evaluation of whether the ASW website provides a clear and responsive layout; is the site providing the user with appropriate feedback upon their actions.
We conducted user testing on 5 different potential users with 6 task list to see how users react to the functionality and navigation of the website. Each test we asked the tester to think aloud to understand their thought process. The test was recorded with screen recorder which captures all the mouse movement and their voice.
We considered a brand-new feature that could potentially set ASW apart from other art websites and influence users to shop with ASW over larger retailers like Amazon or Walmart.
Pick-A-Pack allows consumers to create their own custom sets of reusable art supplies such as pencils, pens, markers and paints.
To ensure that our redesign improves the usability of the website, the team performed a heuristic evaluation to determine if it follows the online standard for interface design. For the redesign to be considered a success, it is important that there is a noticeable improvement in regards to the website’s feel. Heuristic evaluations allow the team to turn that “feel” into quantifiable data.
Although the redesign still falls short in some heuristic aspects, it has been demonstrated through evaluations that it offers significant improvements compared to the original design in terms of clarity and usability. Not only is the redesign more likely to fulfill user satisfaction and ensure a better user experience, it also has a great chance to expand ASW’s customer base with the new Pick-A-Pack feature. Overall, the redesign is a well-balanced synthesis of theories, research and practices, following the basic heuristic guidelines of interface design.