Bay-Made: Creating and sustaining unity through building community
Overview: Bay-Made is an Oakland-based gift and souvenir shop stocked with exclusively local products, artwork, and a selection of quality art and writing supplies. Along with sharing local crafts, they also host creative workshops, and have a bimonthly rotating gallery wall featuring local visual artists. Bay-Made means many things, but they hope you leave inspired to make something of your own. This project is about an e-commerce experience that meets the needs of the business and the needs of the user.
Team/Timeframe:
• 1 UX Designer
• 1 week sprint
Methods:
• business analysis
• user research
• online surveys
• synthesis
• ideation
• rapid prototyping
• usability testing
• digital wire-framing
Tools:
• Sketch
• XD
• Illustrator
• Photoshop
Discovery
Understanding the business:
Goals:
• Sell more goods
• Generate more enrollment for workshops
• Be more relevant
Values:
• Local, local, local
• Creativity
• Empowerment
• Inclusivity
• Educate
• Inform
Mission:
• Creating and sustaining unity through building community
What we need to know about Oakland:
Oakland is a city built on diversity and support. Oakland residents will spend their money locally whenever possible. Building community through programs and projects is what brings the people together and is the glue that keeps them together.
Getting to know our users:
The diversity of users may be broad, depending on the time of the year. Dependent on high tourist seasons and holidays. In this project I focused on one particular set of users that could spread more exposure to Bay-Made through social media and word of mouth.
Define
Our archetype: The Insta Influencer
Based on my findings, the next step was to create an archetype to further understand our user needs.
What matters most: Uniqueness
• Hunts for items that are quirky, original, or on-trend
• Returns 30% of items purchased
• Will abandon purchase if there are hidden fees
• Prefers to complete their purchases in person
• Wants to attend unique events
• Shares favorite finds/experiences and reviews their purchases on social media
• Will abandon a company after bad customer service
Current UX: Needed Redesign
• Hidden navigation upon entering the site
• Unnecessary drop down menus
• Inconsistent navigation
• Little to no hierarchy
• Inactive hamburger menu
• Inactive calendar
• Hero image doesn’t inform or direct
• Very little content
• Clickable images lead user away from the site
Current UX: Is it working?
The Problem
Our target users are not getting what they need to make informed decisions based on viable content. They are also leaving the site by being directed to Instagram with every click of an image. We’ve found that our users are not engaged and leave the site.
The Design Hypothesis
By including informative content, we can engage the user and keep their interest. By applying learnable, memorable navigation and visual hierarchy, we can eliminate pain points to allow them to explore. By applying memorable terminology, we will make categories relatable.
Ideate
Home Page
Workshops
Workshop: Customer Info
Workshop: Shipping Info
Workshop: Customer Info
Workshop: Confirmation
