Aueden

  Background

Aueden is a new home goods company focusing mainly on ceramics. The client is a professional architect who has considered pottery and small furniture making as a hobby for years, all the while dreaming of starting a business one day. They decided to start with a soft launch of their store, Aueden, online with seasonal “drops” of product to feel out the market and slowly ramp up their production abilities. So far the client has only been sharing their work through their personal instagram account, and giving pieces to friends and family. Building out a website will allow them to distance their personal life from their company, will serve as an entry point to the home decor market as a professional entity, and will facilitate secure monetary transactions in exchange for their products. The client wants this website to feel welcoming to everyone and to highlight their commitment to sustainability and community building. The unboxing experience of their products is very important to the client, so we decided to see how we could bring that experience into the website design.

This case study will serve as an overview of the entire design process from the initial user research to the final high fidelity UI webpage designs.

Project Duration: 2 weeks (80 hours)

My Role: Sole Designer, with mentor and client feedback along the way

Topic Research

For this project, I started off with secondary research to familiarize myself with the home goods market and to hone in on some of Aueden’s potential competitors. I also took this as an opportunity to build out a few provisional personas to start getting into the mindset of different types of potential users.

User Interviews

Once familiarized with the market, I moved into conducting my own primary research. The main goal of my research and focus of the interviews is the unboxing experience — What makes it genuinely memorable? What makes it exciting and engaging? How do I translate that into the digital experience?

With that being the goal, I decided conducting individual user interviews would be most beneficial since I was looking for personal insights. The interviews were conducted in person as well as over video call. Questions encouraged participants to share experiences they’ve had shopping for home goods and unboxing items they’ve purchased. Each interview was around 20 minutes. Participants ranged from 22-66 years old and were of varying socioeconomic status.

Research Goals

-Identify what factors contribute to a positive online shopping experience for users looking for home goods

-Gain insight into what makes the unboxing experience enjoyable

-Understand what pain points exist for users during the online shopping experience

-Discover any needs of users that are going unmet in the current home goods space

Key findings:

The most useful insight I gleaned from these interviews is something that seems very obvious now, but is something that wasn’t on my radar at all. I identified a relationship between purchasing behaviors and whether or not users rent or own their homes. According to my research, renters are far less likely to want to purchase things for their living spaces unless it serves an essential function in their daily lives, and they don’t enjoy making these purchases. Renters will buy things as cheaply as they can to get the job done. Conversely, home owners typically enjoy purchasing things for their homes. They commonly spend more time browsing and are looking to spend more money on items with higher quality that will last longer.

With regard to the unboxing experience, I noticed a trend from interview responses suggesting that participants enjoy the unboxing experience when it feels like they are opening a gift. Participants also shared how they enjoy seeing handwritten notes from the person who made the item they are opening because it feels more thoughtful and personalized.

Additional Observations:

-almost all of the participants enjoy buying items that allow them to express themselves the most (usually clothes)

-pain points/frustrations were all related to items they want for their home being out of their budget

-most participants feel items for their home come secondary to other items in their life and that bring them joy

Persona

After synthesizing the user interview results, I pulled together a persona based on the themes that emerged from participant responses. Considering the relationship I discovered between home renting/owning and purchasing behaviors, it was clear to me that this persona needed to be a new homeowner to match Aueden’s target audience.

Site Map

I want to talk a little bit about how my research guided my process through this project, and ultimately informed my design decisions. Since the products this website will be selling are all handmade and high quality, the types of users who will be interested in buying them are most likely going to be homeowners, who enjoy browsing for products for their home and are okay with spending more money. Working off of that insight, I decided to add a landing page as an entry to the home page, almost like a welcome note with a quick introduction. Since users likely aren’t coming to this website looking for something they need quickly, adding another layer to the site seemed like it wouldn’t get in the way of usability. The landing page adds a layer to “unbox” when entering the website to evoke the feeling of opening a gift.

User Flow

Once I got the organization of the website mapped out, I wanted the main user flow to be straight forward since the purpose of the website is ultimately to sell things. The main flow guides the user through arriving at the landing page, finding a product to buy, and checking out either as a guest or with a user account.

 Wireframes

For scope of this project, I built out wireframes for each step in the main user flow. Again, I wanted this to easily read as an e-commerce website but still be interesting to look at. With the home page specifically, I wanted it to feel like an artist’s portfolio with the mosaic of photos at the top of the page and the client’s personal statement. My research showed that when buying home goods, users need to see pieces in context in order to decide if they are inspired to put it in their home and want to purchase the item. The category and product pages are both very photo heavy to reflect this research finding.

Branding

Going into branding for this project, I knew I wanted to go with darker earth tones as a nod to the ceramic heavy product line. The client wanted nice contrast, so I went with a dark brown and an off-white as the primary brand colors and a terracotta accent color. With photography, I wanted to bring in some textures to the home page and get a little abstract to pull in that artist’s portfolio idea. I wanted the landing page to really grab the users attention and serve as a quick introduction to the brand, so I used the oversized logo that bleeds into the margins of the frame and then a short sentence provided by the client about the brand.

Final UI Designs

Here are the main website pages: the home page, the category page, individual item detail, and the shopping bag. I wanted to place different groupings of squares and rectangles throughout the design to keep things interesting, but still wanted everything to feel cohesive. Photos vary from studio detail to set in context to give enough detail about the product but also show how it could be styled in the users home.

Below is the checkout process. I flipped the colors here to signal a shift in function. When you enter this phase you’re leaving the main website and moving towards making your purchase. I wanted this part of the website to feel clean and easy to navigate, since making a purchase should be easy. The confirmation screen at the end of the purchase features a thank you note and a digital version of a signature to reinforce the thoughtfulness identified in my research as an enjoyable part of the unboxing experience.

 Usability Testing

I conducted two usability tests for this project. Once after building out wireframes and another time after adding the UI components. In the first round (wireframes), participants wanted the navigation menu to move with them as they scrolled down the page (a quick fix inside Figma’s prototyping tool). They also wanted the checkout as a guest option easier to find on the sign-in page. Additionally, I decided to re-work the shopping bag page since I wanted it to be more symmetrical.

Usability testing after the UI components were added was really encouraging. This round validated my initial assumptions that users would understand the website as an e-commerce website, what it is at its core. Although e-commerce websites are very common, users responded saying that Aueden has a very unique layout making it interesting to navigate.

Final Revisions and Thoughts

After the second round of usability testing, I made a few adjustments to the UI of the checkout process to give it more depth. I found usability testing to be super helpful in this process, almost acting like a checkpoint to make sure I didn’t stray too far from my initial goals or get carried away with some creative idea that popped up. It kept me accountable to the what this website was meant to accomplish, which was incredibly valuable.

I learned a few important things from this project that I look forward to taking with me to future projects:

-It’s okay to not prioritize making things as fast and easy to find as possible. Sometimes people don’t know what they want and are okay taking a longer road to get there without sacrificing any usability.

-Getting eyes on your designs early and quickly is imperative to keeping yourself accountable to the goals of the project and helps get rid of any bad ideas you might be getting attached to early on.

The biggest challenge in this project was figuring out how to re-imagine the unboxing experience to something digital. To be honest, I thought I would come up with something a lot different that what I ended up with. I had grand ideas of how different this website would be, but ultimately it needed to still function as an e-commerce website; people still need to be able to easily buy things on this website. If I came up with something extraordinarily creative and different, but people didn’t know how to navigate the website or purchase items on it, the website would be a complete failure, right? This realization was a really important experience for me to have as a new designer, and at the end of the day I’m really happy with what I came up with. Feels like a win-win.