Alphachanneling
Role: UX/UI Designer
Duration: 1 month
Tools used: Figma, Miro, Zoom
Project Overview
A project to evaluate and redesign an artwork focused ecommerce site to improve usability and increase sales conversions. Alphachanneling sells art. The number of sales has slowed down over the last year, even with similar traffic. The goal of this project was to explore possible stumbling blocks that were keeping customers from purchasing products, and re-evaluating the overall site layout, navigation, and organization to optimize the user experience.
Project Goals
Increase site usability, especially on mobile
Build customer engagement and time on site
Increase sales by streamlining user journey
Research Methods
Interviews
Competitor analysis
Research
User interviews
6 Questions
5 Subjects
3 Days
Interview Goals
Find any obvious stumbling blocks within Alpha Channeling’s shop system.
Understand the user’s overall feelings and view of AC.
See where users are drawn to on the site, do they go straight to the shop? Do they read the about section, etc?
Findings
Simplify search and make it more prominent - users had trouble finding the search function when looking for a piece by title
Branding and visual design needs to focus on world building - We need to invite shoppers to enter the world of Alphachanneling
Improved navigation and categories could improve site usability - currently users are having to scroll through all artwork to find what they are looking for
Clarify terms - original vs. print gets confusing in regards to linoleum block prints and screenprints vs digital prints
Competitor Research
3 Subjects
Findings
Exhibition A is a good example of how to use minimalism to highlight the work over anything else, but this also makes it lack storytelling or cohesion. The lack of shop navigation, and a general lack of organization leads to confusion. Our goal with this project is to create an organized shopping experience, and this is a good example of what can happen without proper nav. Their types of products and range from prints to original pieces does fit in with the types of products that Alphachanneling sells, and this is an interesting area to explore.
Exhibit A does a good job of having a fairly wide price spread without sacrificing the fine art aspect of the products. This is the main problem I have with Killer Acid. Although they have a great shop that is very easy to use and geared towards sales, they don’t have a fine arts focus. Where Alphachanneling would like to explore low priced items more in terms of giving access to fine art through lower priced items, the originals still need to hold power as fine art objects.
Opportunities
Site Organization
1
Users need more tools to filter and sort products to reduce friction of going through multiple pages to find what they want.
Clarification
2
There are several places of confusion in regards to product details. Digital prints vs original artwork is not clear enough, needs more explanation.
Storytelling
3
Other sites have much more engaging storytelling aspects. The site needs more info about the artist, and pictures and videos of the process would be helpful.
Hierarchy
4
Higher level categories based on similar artworks in different formats, this would improve site usability and present users with more options to purchase.
Presentation
5
A non linear style could break up monotonous content and long pages of featured items and content.
Persona
Finding the user
The persona represents the type of user we expect to be shopping on Alphachanneling.com. This is based on a combination of user research data collected during our site audit and collecting keywords that the work inspired, and outside research of Alphachanneling’s popular instagram profile and the most common people who engaged with their posts. Since AC has such a huge instagram following (over 1 million), we can also conclude that the appeal of AC is extremely wide, and it is difficult to make generalizations about users.
Prototyping
Site Architecture
In order for the site to work more efficiently, we need to make sure that the overall category and nav system makes sense and is as direct as possible.
User Flows
Since the site is ecommerce, we will be focusing on the sales flow. In this case, a user finding a print, and adding it to their cart. Since there has been an overall slowdown in sales, we want to make sure we find the easiest way for users to purchase products.
Lo-fi wireframes
4 iterations
The starting point is mobile wireframes. Over 90% of AC’s site traffic is on mobile. Based on our research findings, the main screens were sketched out. Focusing on the main screens of the site, and the ones necessary to our purchase flow.
Sketches and lo-fi prototypes
Prototype
High-fidelity prototypes
In preperation for user testing, the site was polished up, and photos and placeholders were added.
Click through prototype
To perform user testing, the prototype was connected, and tested extensively to make sure everything worked properly before being put in front of users.
User Testing
Tasks and success criteria
Find “Wild Roses” Print in the “Alchemy’ collection and add to cart
5 Users
1. Provide user with phone for testing
2. Explain to user background of Alphachanneling
3. Explaining the goal of the test
4. Instruct user to talk out loud through their experience and decision making process
5. Take notes of user physical behavior
6. Take notes of stumbling points or long waits to complete tasks.
7. Have user debrief their experience.
Findings
Overall, users had a pretty smooth time getting through the flow.
Each participant completed the flow, and but one completed it in under a minute
Stumbling blocks were very clear:
After selecting the 5 mile radius, users wanted a button to click to apply, instead of clicking on the text.Map view could be larger, with more contrasting icons. Category buttons need to be smaller (maybe collapse them?)
Colors could be used more effectively to guide users through certain sections.
Final Designs
Priorities after testing
Change location page “Sign In” button to more direct “search locations” button.
The map needs to be larger, ideally taking up the whole screen. This way, icons can be larger and overall easier to navigate. Maybe we can collapse the categories as a whole into a horizontal list.
The bar to access the location and date filter section is too separated from the rest. This may be solved by simply changing the layout and size of the category icons.
In regards to this, we can consider forcing the filtering stage on users, as there was some confusion during testing about the top filter bar and how to make these changes.
Other considerations
Smaller categories give more room for actual content
Dark background when faded for more emphasis on pop up menus
Varied colors of each event date to distinguish better between different days.
Navigation
V1
V2
Changes made:
Reworked navigation system to be more straightforward. Instead of having to click to get further choices, we can select easily from the main menu.
Renamed Collections to Series. We are really trying to emphasize the different groups of related artworks, instead of just having large, multipage lists of products.
Add to cart
V1
V2
Changes made:
Saved a click for users to view the cart. It now has a card that pops out and displays details. Clicking outside of the pop out will go back to the section the user was in before selecting the item. They can also head straight to checkout from here.
Removed the selection menu on the go to cart page. I don’t think this is necessary, and adds extra ambiguity to the completion of a task, adding an item to cart. In the new instance, users will have to reclick the item and select size again and add to cart.
Next steps
Build out the rest of the site
Further user testing to assess possible blind spots
Explore further marketing and sales promotion potential
Build email marketing strategy and newsletter sign up
Pass on to development team
Launch site
