west elm
Project: west elm -Interior Designer
Role: Generalist
Features: Onboarding quiz ● Product Discovery ● Design Inspiration ● Video Chat ● Mood Boards
Tools: Figma, Miro, Sketch, Invision
West Elm is a retail home furnishing brand that is part of Williams-Sonoma, Inc. West Elm creates unique, modern and affordable home decor. Our team has been contracted by West Elm to establish user need and create a mobile prototype that connect their interior design team with potential customers. They have an even greater opportunity for growth by providing the west elm experience through technology.
Analyzing the website for more information
To measure the usability of the west elm service, our team assigned everyone to navigate throughout the website, carrying a range of basic tasks to understand how best the site is serving its purpose. All the members have worked together and identified few heuristic violations that we can consider working on during our design phase. Key takeaways were:
Locating designers was difficult
Visual design fails which caused confusions
Inconsistent and unsatisfactory
Comparing and Contrasting with competition
The competitors were Décor matters, Design matters, Houzz. Given few of the feature suggestion we headed to observe and understand the competitors’ websites while users attempted a series of feature related tasks. We gathered data related to understanding the user satisfaction and pain points. Key takeaways were:
Users were interested in one click sign up button
Streamline with the social media accounts
Interested in quiz related to their design choices
Visual Images influence
The users were not interested in Augmented reality and Chat as they found them to be unrealistic and non essential to present modern lifestyle
To generate some preliminary ideas
Task analysis is the study that helps us understand as how the users are performing tasks to meet the desired goal. By doing that we understand the key issues in their process of existing flow and better design opportunities for our application.
Key takeaways were:
Visual representation
Color choices
Bread crumbs showing process
Brands and requirements
Effective way to extract information...Interviews
Each member of our team, typically performed user interviews with the potential users. During early discovery phase the user feelings, motivations, needs and frustration is recorded as qualitative data. We followed a methodology where we covered numerous topics and made a record of what user said in the interviews, and later analyzed the conversation.
After finding the qualitative data from User interviews we did Affinity mapping to synthesize and define the data. Now we were able to redefine the problem statement and had different ideas as how might we help our potential users. in this process the key takeaways were:
Users wanted a personable connect with Designers
Visualize the products and get information
Needed visual images to inspire
Direct connect with experts through out the process
This is what user is saying....
Ebony needs a personable, application to connect with an Interior Designer/Decorator so that she can efficiently steam line a project
Ebony’s Emotion
HMW-Opportunities are insights gained from journey mapping on how to inspire Ebony use the app regularly, giving her many options to choose and make it more Personable with Designer
User needs prioritized features
Heads down to design studio
We all Headed to design studio to put our ideas as sketches and brainstorm different possible solutions for our ‘How Might We Help - HMW’ problems. Paper sketches are fast, easy and efficient approach for Ideation as everyone has ability to bring together the perspective and strength of our team together.
The Key takeaway was to pick best practical innovative solution to inspire the users and better design process.
Paper sketches to wireframs interface
Each member of our team reached out to external testers for usability test on Low Fidelity wireframe through Zoom call. We provided them with an interactive interface and requested feed back in the form of red and green boxes drawn around the feedback sections.
The few points of consideration were
Users found login tab too small to be noticed,
Some part of screen text was confusing in functionality
Needed User/Designer guided quiz
High Fidelity prototype
The key takeaways were:
To show the Mood board as where they are located
To show the screen showing the designer calling the user
To connect the user by designer based on geo location
Should be able to scroll left or right and does not need a signifier
at the bottom of screen which is mostly hidden (until scrolled to the end)
Meet the outstanding team that came up with this approach and design. There was so much that I learnt from the team, it helped me shape into a better UX person. Thanks team!
