A design improvement to browse and buy the essential items of a magazine look for your home with one click.
Responsibility: Research Analysis, Design Strategy, UI Design, Wireframing, Prototyping, Hi-Fi Design
House2Home - an eCommerce website selling home decorative items -- realizes that the purchase rate is low in young customers with limited budget. For those customers, the delicacy and layered details of a poster look is a drawback rather than selling point. They are always overwhelmed by how complicated a look is and how many items in that look. They want a quick facelift with limited purchases and visualize how things come together before place the order.
Budget is the key in decision making.
Needs to identify the essential items in a style look.
Needs to visualize how different items come together.
Needs to know the overall cost of a look after adding/subtracting items.
Needs to actively engage users from design inspirations to final purchase.
Needs to make sure customers can customize a magazine look by adding/deleting/replacing items.
Needs to increase the purchase conversion rate.
A linear flowchart is utilized to depict how the users and other key players (on the left end) achieve their goals (on the right end). And the middle steps is how the users interact with the product to achieve their goals, which also serves as the base for future design.
How might we help user to choose items to recreate their preferred style within budget?
How might we help user to visualize how items look together in their own room?
How might we help user to decide the minimum essential items for certain look?
How might we decrease user’s time on random search, create a efficient “look to item” shopping and decision making process?
Furniture eCommerce and Home Planning products are 2 main categories for design reference. Design inspirations have been drawn from "Room Planner", "Home Styler", "Joss & Main", "Crate & Barrel", and "Living Spaces".
In order to keep the effort focused, I decide to limit the Crazy 8s sketches to critical steps. Based on the user research, user's freedom to edit a style look to decide essential items for composing a look and to visualize different items come together is critical. Also, this function will make this product stands out from other shopping platforms. Meanwhile, this project is a web-based product, so the design approaches about customized editing cannot be as versatile as phone-based app. The design approaches for critical steps should be a middle ground between advanced 3D technique and traditional static images.
In order to keep the design focused and feasible. The storyboards have been presented to the users to validate their needs, as a result, 2 sets of the storyboard resonate most with the users since they have the most fundamental needs list as below.
Since the crazy8s sketches have already addressed innovative design solutions for critical steps, the current main goal is to complete the whole user interactive process and make it as smooth and intuitive as possible instead of being more creative or scratching for new ideas.
As a website selling home decorative items, it is important to deliver a sense of comfortable & cozy while keep the color palette stylish and neutral.
* Due to the technical issues on the hosting platform, the prototyping video cannot show appropriately. I am working on it to resolve the problem, please reach out to me for a prototype link.
