Pottery Barn- Website Redesign
Pottery Barn is a high-end brand for home furnishing and decorative items, known for its craftsmanship and high-quality furniture.
While continuing to evolve and offer design services in addition to thoughtful designs, their website on the other hand does not match these attributes.
Their web presence is overwhelming, confusing and the shopping experience is simply frustrating.
The site has evident usability issues that consequently deter loyal and potential customers from shopping, which sadly costing the business loss of sales.
My Role: UX/UI Design
SEE LIVE PROTOTYPE
Project Challenge
The goal for this project was to identify user's pain points through a specific task of purchasing a sofa.
Determine possible solutions and redesign a more simple and easy way to navigate through the site.
Research
Methods & Findings
I started the discovery phase with a task analysis of 10 users that were instructed to search for a sofa, add it to their cart and complete the task all the way to entering their info on the payment page.
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The observation was followed by interviews and a Heuristic Evaluation to identify any pain points, and right after- competitor analysis.
70% of users went to the Search bar to enter “sofa” instead of selecting a category from the menu first, due to multiple navigation bars that created confusion.
Overwhelming Menu: when the dropdown menu opens there’s so much information overload, too many categories to select from, duplication and no clear separation between sections. Users were confused by the number of sofa subcategories found under furniture and weren’t sure what to click on.
Legibility: the font was too small and hard to read as well as multiple fonts used throughout the site.
90% of users found the site to be text heavy with distracting information while shopping.
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Dialogues contain information that competes with the relevant information diminishes their relative visibility and distracts the users from accomplishing their task.
90% of users thought the fabric options in the item description are redundant and overwhelming.
There was an evident lack of clear product images and instead just the item picture in an existing room that again, created a feel of overwhelm.
The checkout process was too long and users couldn’t tell the difference between “checkout as guest” and “express checkout."
It was clear I needed to start by reorganizing the categories and Information Architecture was the best place to begin.
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A card sort was the foundation to a site map and once the information was sorted, the structure was created and a new user flow followed.
Information Architecture
Redesigned Sitemap
Persona
The structure was in place. It was time to discover who our users were by creating a persona and eliminating pain points by developing a user flow.
User Flow
After understanding the market as well as the users needs, wants and frustrations, I started designing an experience that will meet the company’s need for an updated look and the customers expectations.
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Also, it was important to speed things up and making the overall shopping experience more efficient by creating a new checkout process.
I replaced the cluttered homepage screen and menu by a clean design, offering a simple, yet efficient interface where the design matches the company’s identity and meets the user's expectations.
A clean global navigation system was created by moving less important information to the footer, condensing secondary navigation into it’s own category into the global navigation bar and concealing unnecessary information to be visible only when needed.
More filters were added to the product listing page so users can apply in the main categories and customize their search by any criteria they wish.
The checkout process was redesigned and shortened to a three step process instead of five, and the interface was cleaned out of unnecessary noise.
It will be necessary to test the checkout flow in a controlled environment to determine success by KPI’s and see if the new redesign does drive up revenue.
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Testing will be needed in order to see if users can find different products and services easily enough with the new redesigned navigation.
Since Pottery Barn offers an extensive array of sofas and sectionals, fabric options and customized items, implementing filters is crucial and therefore, taxonomy has to be used correctly and accurately.
Next Steps
