Elliott Bay Book Company is an independent bookstore and a cultural touchstone in Seattle. Although its brick-and-mortar presence is held in high esteem, their online experience needs to be brought up to speed in the digital age, by turning the focus to user engagement and increasing sales intent.
OVERVIEW
Redesign the home page, product page, and checkout process.
MY ROLE
Research
Usability testing
Ideation
UI design
Prototyping
To be sure I was addressing the right problems, I designed my process around cycles of prototyping and face-to-face user sessions to validate assumptions from real users. I wanted to create a better experience for exploring Elliott Bay's unique offerings, like their vast book repository, curated bundles, and Staff Picks.
With endless examples to glean insights from, Amazon and Barnes & Noble were the obvious benchmarks. I also opened it up to any renowned e-commerce sites. From there, I could bridge the gap between the user experiences of those established companies and Elliott Bay's users' needs.
During usability testing, all users spent most of their time reviewing Staff Picks or curated selections. Those users also did not trust recommendations from other e-commerce sites.
With the home page and Staff Picks as the primary touch points, we set up the web design's architecture based on the two main use-cases: "I want to find thoughtful book recommendations" and "I want to discover new books catered toward my taste".
So I thought how might we build a site that encourages exploration and elevates the curated staff recommendations. In turn, this will increase engagement and sales. After user tests and usability testing, the story became clear on user goals.
The next big challenge was uncovering the most sensible and meaningful visual hierarchy and information architecture for users to discover and search for books.
Drawing on user interviews and usability tests, I built the home page layout according to their feedback and interest on certain sections. Since the book of the month and staff picks were magnets for user attention, I added prominent visuals to highlight the curated recommendations.
In addition to creating a pared down and easily-understood visual hierarchy, I organized the navigation bar so their staff picks and curated bundles were a click away. To further engagement and create a feeling similar to exploration and wonder in a bookstore, I added an "I'm Feeling" function.
Talking to users, it soon became apparent that they were far more trustful of an independent bookstore's recommendations than Amazon's or Barnes & Noble's. In fact, nearly all of them would purchase a book that was recommended by the former while none for the latter.
Building on that insight, I continued with the independent bookstore theme in the Products Page. A combination of a zoom function and page preview lent to the feeling of perusing in a bookstore. Since there's embedded trust, I added book recommendation when users clicked to learn more about a specific book.
While searching for books and exploring staff recommendations were important, the checkout user experience was highlighted as an area that created unnecessary friction among our users.
With the checkout process refined in e-commerce, there were countless ways to approach this challenge. Most of the friction was pinpointed on the fill form's confusing layout and excessive amount of steps to complete a checkout.
So it was obvious on how to optimize this process: simplify the form layout with a clear information structure and shorten the checkout process.
The most intriguing aspect about building new products or redesigning old ones is the experimentation and observing how my ideas fare in the field. I was fascinated with the "I'm Feeling" function and would love to further develop that idea. I would also love to explore on building a mobile version.
Lastly, it'd be insightful if I gained access to their web analytics to see what worked and what didn't.