Google Venture | Competitive analysis | Prototyping | Usability testing
Project Overview
Under a modified Google Venture design sprint, I designed a simple e-commerce website with the fictional company, House2Home, in order to help users, who recently moved into a new home, find and purchase an item that best fits their ideal interior design.
Timeline
Day 1 - Understanding the problem space and drafting userflows Day 2 - Competitive analysis and sketching Day 3 - Storyboarding Day 4 - Designing and prototyping Day 5 - Usability testing & evaluation
My Role
For this project, I served as a solo UI/UX designer. Major tasks involved designing userflows, competitive analyses, sketching, storyboarding, mockups, prototyping, usability testing, and iterations.
Design Tools
Project Goals
Design a website where new residents can easily find affordable decor by categorizing common trends in interior design styles.
Day 1 - Understanding the Problem Space and Drafting Userflows
House2Home was designed for people who recently moved to a new home and were looking for items to decorate their space at an affordable price. A website would provide users with inspiration and bundles of images with prospective interior design that matches the user’s intended style.
Day 2 - Competitive Analysis and Sketching
On the second day of the modified GV design sprint, I researched other websites for inspiration to help me find an ideal design for the House2Home website in terms of UI and UX elements.
reDesign home website
ReDesign home was designed for boutique interior design studio that seeked to provide the necessary items for renovations. I liked that the website showed a picture of an item first and then allowed a user to click the item to get more details.The website was clean, bright, and provided detailed dimensions about their products.
H&M website
The H&M website was a common clothing eCommerce website. For this website, I focused on the steps it took to purchase an item. The transaction process did not allow a user to complete a payment if the user had not completely entered their personal, billing, shipping, and payment information. This was shown by the “Almost done” button being grayed out and unclickable, and this button turned into a clickable black color once the necessary information had been filled
DJI website
The DJI website had minimal UI elements and large pictures to showcase their products. This helped users find unique items easier without having to scroll through a list of categories without pictures.The product page of the website also showed each item that they were advertising with its own section and detailed views. The website was very organized and presented a summarized description of each product prior to accessing the corresponding item page.
Sketching crazy 8's
I sketched out eight screens that were essential for the upcoming website that I'm designing for House2Home. The most critical screen I chose was the shopping cart page because this represented the bridge between the main e-commerce and the payment pages.
Soon after I picked the most critical screen, I sketched a three panel board that detailed the screens that come before and after the most critical screen (shopping cart page).
Day 3 - Storyboarding
Based on the three panel board, I chose to find solutions for users that already had an intended interior design and helped them find, and purchase, items that best fits their space.
I interviewed five participants to test my prototype who were either interested in buying accessories to decorate their home or are new occupants of a home, or apartment, that wanted to find an interior design that best fits their space.
Some of the suggestions for improvement include:
1. Text alignments in the "order details" section. 2. Button consistency.
Iterations
Lessons Learned
The modified Google Venture design sprint allowed me to conduct a solo design sprint within five days. This was my first design sprint and first e-commerce UI/UX experience. I learned to prioritize critical elements to develop a prototype that strived to be a deliverable. This session taught me to understand the problem space, create valuable screens that accommodate the target audience, and understand my place with a team when user research was provided.
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