We live in the era of online shopping. To survive
the latest market trends, businesses must have
an online presence. So, I have redesigned Swipe
to bring it up to speed of recent times.
We live in the era of online shopping.
To survive the latest market trends, businesses must have an online presence. So, I have redesigned Swipe to bring it up to speed of recent times.
Swipe is Toronto's local and independent design book store with exquisite collection of books on graphic design, advertising, architecture and urbanism. Along with books, Swipe also offers very interesting and carefully curated items in-store.
I visited ‘Swipe’ store and spoke to a few people who work there to understand the business needs.
While in store I noticed that, some books were organized on shelves and some were on the table based on the genre. The store also offers curated items which were organized but not clearly categorized.
One of the unique business requirement Swipe has is that, they want people to visit the store and not just order online.
I had a good chat with a couple of people visiting the store. People love to visit the store but always like to have an option to buy books online. A lot of people buy books on recommendations from their family, friends, co-workers etc.
My observations:
No E-commerce Experience
Lacks Branding
Website Looks Outdated
Local Events Not Updated
After the field trip, I conducted a competitive analysis to find out how Swipe compares with other bookstores. Our competitors include Type, Indigo, Barnes and Nobles and Amazon.
Compared online bookstores based on:
Next, I performed a quantitative analysis to figure out users expectation when shopping online especially books.
From my research and user surveys, people who often visit Swipe can be categorized into three types: designers, readers and artists.
"Customers can only buy books in the store and struggle to stay updated on upcoming events in the store because, they cannot browse items online and events page is not updated regularly on Swipe's website."
A new sitemap for Swipe's website.
Site map helped me to list users' most common way to interact with the redesigned website, and I could design a userflow for it.
Lists books in various categories and shows upcoming events
Contains all the details of the book
Displays the items users wish to purchase
I tested iteration 1 with 5 users. 3 of them mentioned that they had to scroll a lot to get to the book they were interested in.
Moved the books catalog to new page. Users can access it using the navigation on the top of the homepage.
Following are snapshots of the high fidelity designs.
You can also interact with the InVision prototype
Here’s the comparison of Swipe before and after the redesign:
Compared with the previous version of the homepage, our newly designed homepage increased the users interest in Swipe. When user tested the mockups, users demonstrated an increase in ease of navigating through the website intuitively.
My main focus of the redesign exercise was to empathize with the user along with keeping business needs in mind. I learned that iterative testing was the key to maintain a balance between authenticity of existing site versus new features.
UI Faces
unDraw
