Outline

Vermont Folk Rocker is a furniture company with a unique and profitable product. While the product itself remains evergreen, the company's website has remained largely the same for almost 20 years. This project was an exercise to conduct user research on an existing site, and perform a hypothetical redesign based on those findings.

Research

A study of 8 individuals was conducted to ascertain areas for improvement on the site. Participants ranged in age from 29 to 46.

Participants were asked to view the website on a mobile device and a desktop or laptop computer. Participants were asked to perform a set of tasks on the website using both devices, describe their experiences and rating their experiences on a scale from 1 to 5:

1 - Impossible to complete the task
2 - Difficult to complete the task
3 - Neither easy nor difficult to complete
4 - Easy to complete the task
5 - Task is completed effortlessly

Results

Navigation:
A majority of participants found the website difficult to navigate on mobile devices:

5 participants found the lack of responsive design contributed to this experience.

4 participants found that the high number of links in the navigation contributed to this experience.

Purchasing:
A majority of participants experienced difficulty or indifference in purchasing a rocker.

6 participants cited the lack of online ordering or need to order via phone as an impediment to placing their order.

Aesthetics:
6 participants noted some element of the website’s design, aesthetics or presentation as looking out of date and contributed qualitatively to the experiences above.

Findings

User testing provided us with the following opportunities for improvement.

Implementing a responsive design

Reducing and consolidating the number of navigation links

Adding online ordering functionality

Modernizing the design

Wireframing

Style

Components

Prototyping

Mockups

Re-Testing

The same group of users repeated testing during prototyping. All tasks were completed with a rating of 3 or above, a significant improvement to testing before the redesign.

Implementation

For a small company like this, I would recommend implementing these changes through a custom Shopify site, given it's low cost of implementation and ease of maintenance. The next steps would be to create a product catalog, develop and launch the new site, and start directing potential customers to the site.