The Challenge
As part of Evine’s initiative to revamp and modernize their online presence, I was asked to familiarize myself with the needs and habits of their users in order to propose some layouts, content, and a user path that would be more welcoming, friendlier to navigate, and resonate better with their audience.
The Process
Review Evine’s consumer research
Process usability testing footage
Conduct secondary research into general demographic trends
Create and iterate upon the prototypes of proposed changes
Walk through proposal and reasoning with members of the development team
The Solution
The proposal included a major overhaul of the home page to better showcase the variety of goods Evine offers, as well as adding information that would be relevant to their primary demographic. Changes to the shopping process included clearer indicators of what was being purchased and a checkout with fewer interruptions.
Consumer Research & Personas
The first stage of this project involved acquainting myself with the consumer research that Evine had already conducted in order to be able to create accurate personas that would be representative of the people who made up their customers. To represent a majority of Evine’s users, I put together the persona of a woman in her fifties who would like her shopping experience to be as enjoyable, fun, and hassle-free as possible so that she could devote more of her energy towards living her life, such as spending time working for charitable causes or engaging in activities with family. This would prove to be a useful tool for helping the team remain focused on providing the right experience for their users.
Usability Footage & Secondary Research
Slide highlighting aspects that users appreciated or found difficult during the user testing process
Another one of Evine’s efforts to better understand both their users and any pain points they might experience throughout the shopping process was to perform remote usability testing. This testing involved asking different groups of users to complete a series of tasks on either their current website or an updated version to assess which aspects of both resonated best with users. I was tasked with watching the recordings of the testing and pulling out the key insights along with some proposed solutions to address the input and feedback from users. All of this information was then compiled into a series of slides that were presented to Evine’s management and development teams to aid their understanding of how users interact with their website.
Prototyping
Portion of an early, low-fidelity wireframe marked for annotation
Corresponding annotations explaining the reasoning behind each section
With all of this knowledge in hand, my next step was to begin creating some wireframe prototypes showing both the key content and potential layouts on a number of different pages. Due to the nature of Evine as a home shopping channel, users would often utilize their mobile devices to follow along, research, and take note of items as they watched, then some of those users would later switch to a different device to make the purchase. Therefore, it was important to ensure that all of the designs would translate well across a number of different devices and screen sizes, as well as making the process of switching between devices as seamless as possible.
Final Presentation & Handoff
After receiving feedback from the team on several iterations of the wireframes, we were satisfied with the state of the proposals as a guideline for continuing with the redesign project. I prepared one final presentation for the full team to ensure that everybody was familiar with the content. In addition to the wireframes layouts and content suggestions, I also gave some recommendations for other areas that users would find helpful such as altering the database of product information to more accurately reflect the way that users tend to think about what they want to find.