Seungyong Han
SY

Blue Dahlia

Supporting Local Business

Blue Dahlia is an antiques and clothing store located in the heart of Dallas.

ROLE
TIME
TEAM
Responsible for the entire research and design process
Solo Project
4 Weeks

OVERVIEW

Since the pandemic, staying indoors has naturally increased the need for online shopping, and we have seen rapid changes in behavior that would have otherwise taken years.

THE PROBLEM

Client’s business has grown but their website doesn’t reflect that and it isn’t user friendly nor aesthetically appealing.

BLUE DAHLIA↗

THE SOLUTION

THE RESEARCH

Through this research I’m hoping to learn the current problems of Blue Dahlia’s website and what the needs and the pain points are for those users that shop clothes online. Also, I’m hoping to learn some of the features of competitors that are solving those baseline expectations of their users.

INITIAL AUDIT

Initial audit was done to understand what the users were experiencing with the current website. I chose to run a usability test on the current website to learn how user’s were responding to the client’s website and performed a follow-up interview to learn about the experience user’s had.

On-site Initial Usability Test + Follow-up Interview
  • The task of the test was to search for a certain product and purchase it.
  • All 3 users were able to successfully perform the given task but took more than 3 minutes to search and purchase a product
Insights
  • Users experienced difficulty in searching for a product
  • Navigating the website wasn't a pleasant experience
  • Products did not have detailed information

USER RESEARCH

Conducted a user research to ultimately empathize with the users. I specifically chose to perform a user interview since it gives any qualitative information about the user. I began the research by writing out my conversation guide and interview questions. Then I asked people around me for a user interview.

User Interviews
  • Remotely interviewed 5 users that frequently shop online for clothes.
  • The goal of this interview was to learn what users are looking for and the pain points they might have when shopping for clothes online
Affinity Map
User Persona

With the user persona I was able to empathize with the users to develop a problem statement which is crucial for user research because it summarizes all the research and insights we developed and concise it into one statement.

"Users want to save money and need a faster way to navigate the website so that they can have a better shopping experience."

ADDITIONAL RESEARCH

I also wanted to do an additional research to get ideas on how I want to approach the problem and possibly get inspiration from competitors.

Competitive Analysis

The goal of competitive analysis was to see how Blue Dahlia's direct competitors' feature sets were solving some of the issues and baseline expectations for similar user groups.

Lululemon's feature sets
Madewell's feature sets
Comparative Analysis

The goal of comparative analysis was to get inspiration on how best-in-class competitors were doing to make the online shopping experience better for the users.

Uber Eats' feature set
Amazon's feature sets

IDEATION

With all the insights that I gathered through initial audit, user research, competitive and comparative analysis, I was able to choose 4 key insights I wanted to touch on.

  • How might we help users save money?
  • How might we help users search and look through products faster and efficiently?
  • How might we help users checkout faster and efficiently?
  • How might we help users contact customer service quickly without waiting?

Wireframe

Current user flow of searching and purchasing a product
Redesigned user flow of searching and purchasing a product

The difference of these two user flows are that redesigned user flow attempts to gives more freedom and methods for the user to search for a product and also shortening the checkout process.

Usability Test

With the wireframes and the prototype, I wanted to conduct a usability test to learn how users would experience the redesigned website.

  • The goal was to understand if the redesigned user experience made sense to the user
  • The task of the test was to search for a certain product and purchase it.
  • All 5 users took less than 1 minute to search and purchase a certain product
Feedback
  • “Icons and font size can be bigger”
  • “Wants to see the cart after adding items to cart”
  • “Have a feature to be able to change items per row”

THE SOLUTION

Based on the insights I gathered from my usability tests, I was able to implement changes to my prototype.

Below is a clickable prototype or you can click this, give it a try!

Key Changes
Homepage

NEXT STEPS

For my next step I would like to ask the client for professionally taken photos of products so that it is more appealing to customers and also would like to conduct additional usability tests to make sure searching and purchasing a product makes sense and is not time consuming.

I would also like to establish a proper design system for the client so that everything looks consistent.

Lastly, I would like to challenge myself to redesign accounts page so that it is a user-friendlier experience for returning users and also redesign the shopping cart so that the shopping cart is more intuitive.

FINAL THOUGHT

Working on this project, I have learned various methods of user research and how it can impact the final solution. I also learned that redesigning a business website can greatly improve user satisfaction and overall success of tasks.

Also learned that by focusing on the needs and expectations of the user, creating a clear and intuitive navigation structure is crucial for establishing a strong online presence and setting a business apart in a competitive market.