Time: In this 2-week design sprint I was responsible for conducting user interviews and usability testing as well as the entire design process.
Role: UX Researcher and Designer
Tools: Sketch, Illustrator, Miro
Elegant Findings is a small antiques store located in Boston. They specialize in porcelain, furniture, and kitchenware but they have an extremely wide range of antique products.
Elegant Findings Antiques wants to modernize their website while still emulating a feeling of elegance and maturity to match their physical store.
Like most over stocked antique stores Elegant Findings is charming, but chaotic at the same time. Their current website matches that feeling of clutter and confusion.
We conducted a heuristics analysis, to rate the severity for each heuristic for Elegant Findings Antique's Website. The most severe problems occurred in memorability and satisfaction.
Users have to sort through a lot of information to find what they are looking for. Some major problems on their website were blurry logo and photos, huge drop down menus, a confusing navigation bar, a general lack of product information, and wide text columns that were difficult to read.
With a competitive analysis, we identified four key features that made our competitors' websites more successful than ours.
Isa, the influencer is often looking for unique pieces to decorate her home and spends a lot of time browsing online antique and action sights. She prefers to buy online because of her busy schedule and shares her favorite purchases on her social media.
Isa finds it difficult to shop at Elegant Antiques online because she is not able to get a full product descriptions or high quality photos of the products. She needs a way to ensure the antiques she is shopping for are authentic and in good condition.
By incorporating better photos and a history of the product, Isa will feel more confident to shop at Elegant Antiques.
To map out each step Isa takes on the Elegant Antiques website, we created a user flow. The diagram displays the complete path Chelsea takes from deciding to buy an antique to purchasing the product and checking out.
I began my ideation process by sketching out different layout options and interaction patterns for the main functionalities.
We wanted to modernize the homepage layout so we updated the layout of information to give all the elements more breathing room and create a call to action.
We moved the navigation bar to a more central location for accessibility and added a contact section to simplify homepage information.
Once we were confident users could easily navigate the website, we put in a more extensive shopping filter for a more curated shopping experience.
We wanted to honor the original website's goal of maturity and gracefulness while giving it a more clean and modern feel. We accomplished this by using dark hues and creating a limited color scheme.
We updated the homepage design one more time, making the call to action even more clear and separating the information with large photos.
We then added a section at the bottom of every product page, recommending similar products to the one being viewed, encouraging the shopping to keep browsing.
Looking forward we would like to to create an antique shopper community by implementing a blog or an email newsletter. When it comes to antique shopping, influencers like Isa love to share their favorite finds online and giving shoppers the opportunity to share their purchases and experiences will create a loyal group of Elegant Findings Antiques customers.
Given an opportunity, we would like to expand our research demographics beyond the 25-30-year-old range as antique shoppers come in all ages with different needs and desires.
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