The Problem

William-Sonoma is looking to design an E-commerce micro-site, and will be featuring 100 highly curated products from their current inventory for this direct marketing campaign focusing on specific users.

Considerations

Suggested Products based off of behavior?
Products are had to find?
Offer Different Shipping Options?
Ability for Contact Options?
Focus on New Inventory?
Make Shipping Returns Easy?
Product Ratings?
Reduce Navigation Categories?
Streamline the User Experience?

The Goal

The goal, to design a working Medium-fidelity prototype around an online shopping experience catered towards specific personas. The design should meet the needs of the users, the goals of the business, and all while adhere to Williams-Sonoma brand standards.

Competitors Websites and Research

I started out doing a ton of user research on Williams-Sonoma's competitors websites. I found the results interesting because I didn't think of some of these companies as competitors. There are many different navigation styles and each company approached it with a different take on how the user would interact with the website.

Comparing the website, bigger fonts were used, along with images as navigation tools. I found this made it easier to navigate the website when trying to find a specific product.

Williams-Sonoma Site Analysis

Doing site analysis on the Williams-Sonoma website I found that the use of small fonts for navigation is extremely hard to read for user. Another issue is the flyout menu that they use hides product images on the page. These issues could easily be corrected to make the user experience easier and more enjoyable.

Customer Issues to Address

• Suggested Products based off of behavior
• Products are hard to find
• Offer different shipping options
• Ability for contact options
• More focus on new inventory
• Make shipping returns easier
• Product ratings are hidden at bottom of page
• Reduce navigation categories
• Streamline the user experience

Existing Site Map

After finishing up the all the research, I first started out by mapping out Williams-Sonoma's current website to help give me a better understanding of how they categorize their products on the current website. This helped give me a better understanding before I start to designing the Micro-Site.

Research & Wireframe Sketches

After selecting the 100 products, I printed each product and then conducted a card sorting exercise and had user categorized products. The purpose o fthis was to see if user categorized products in the same manner. From here I moved forward with a proposed site map and started sketching ideas for layouts.

Proposed Site Map and Personas

After the card sorting exercise, sketching and user feedback that I got, I created a proposed site map for the micro-site. We were given the 3 specific personas for this project. I had enough information from the card sorting, user information and research that I created the initial user flow representing how each personas would move through the micro-site.

Williams-Sonoma Micro Site

From here I designed and created all the assets for the micro-site and created a medium fidelity prototype in Axure, presenting one of the persona's user flows throughout the purchasing and checkout process. All annotations for changes in the micro-site were done in Axure as well.

williams-sonoma

direct marketing micro-site