This redesign website revitalizes the Southern Crafted online presence, reflecting the brand’s unique warmth and craftsmanship.
Process
01 Research
Observe and interview
The insights we gathered from user feedback indicate that we need to improve these information clarity for them.
Card sorting
To ensuring that the organization of content on websites aligns with users' intuitions and enhances the overall user experience. We invited four people to participate in our card sorting activity.
Findings: Users believe that "Shop," "About Us," and "Profile" should be presented as dropdown menus, as this aligns with common shopping website layouts.
Findings: For the promotions, users feel confused by the collection names and would prefer to see images first. As for the featured section, since the craftsmen are not well-known, it would be better to showcase their products alongside their introductions.
Contextual inquiry
To understand how our users feel and navigate the original website, we used the method of contextual inquiry. And came up with the following User Journey Map.
02 Design
Information architecture
We have reorganized the IA of the site, reorganized the structure and classification of the site, aiming to solve the problem of difficult to navigate, as well as hard access to information. In addition, UX writing was used to rename some sections to solve the problem that category names were not intuitive. Feel free to drag the button to see how the as-is site map compares to the To-be site map.
Two version's Prototype
In order to better test customer preference, we create two different versions.
Version1: Aligns with the original site’s elegant style
Version 2: focuses on simplicity and clean.
Color & Typography
03 A/B Testing & Usability Testing
To identify our users‘ habit and optimize the website to be seamlessly and attractive, we used the method of User Testing and A/B Test.
Test Result & Insight
User Prefer…
Craftsmen
Users often have a wide range of opinions—even completely contradictory ones. As designers, it's important not to follow every suggestion blindly but to apply our own judgment and insight. Every design iteration will have both supporters and critics; user feedback is valuable as a reference, yet it shouldn't dictate every decision. No design can satisfy everyone, so we must embrace imperfection.
