Audwell
Fostering harmony between parents and children through thoughtful design.
ROLE
UX Designer
STRATEGIES
User research, UI Design, Prototyping
TEAM
2 UX Researchers & 2 UX Designers
TIMELINE
3-Week Sprint
TOOLS
Figma, Trello, Maze
About the Project
Shopping online for furniture can be stressful. It is especially a hassle for parents with kids who are constantly growing and need new furniture. However, many online stores sell products that are meant to be tossed into the trash after a couple of months. For this reason, Audwell has crafted visually appealing pieces that can be saved for longer periods of time while also encouraging independence for growing kids.
Audwell is a B2C e-commerce site that sought my team and I out to discover ways to re-engage its customers so they could share furniture that encourages harmony. The main problem for this small business is that customers are dropping off the homepage faster than expected.
My team and I were tasked with designing a website that embodied Audwell’s minimalistic vision. It was important for the team to redesign a website that carried the company’s goal of creating pieces that minimized stress and increased harmony for the mind.
Process Breakdown
Problem
Research
Ideation
Implementation
Conclusion
PROBLEM
A lot of parents are choosing to follow a minimalist style. However, children’s products, like furniture, make it difficult to align with this lifestyle. Customers now realize that the vibrant colors from children’s products accumulate, which causes an uneasy state of mind. Parents are now reaching for pieces that line up with their home aesthetic to reduce this stress. By doing this, parents will be able to spend more time with their loved ones instead of dealing with the clutter in their homes
RESEARCH
Preliminary Usability Test
Audwell’s previous website did a very good job following their chosen color palette. However, following a color palette doesn’t always mean the website is guaranteed to be successful. Therefore, we conducted a preliminary usability test to identify problems users faced when browsing Audwell’s website. With the information given by our users, we uncovered pain points that needed to be alleviated.
Audwell titled their blog guidebook. This was confusing for a lot of users when tasked to find the blog page. Users grew frustrated that the blog was not given a more obvious title.
What is a guidebook?
Nice colors, but where is the search bar and text?
Audwell has a very specific color scheme that is used throughout the website. It’s very minimalistic, but users noted it was extremely difficult to find the search bar, which had blended into the green banner. We also checked to see if the colors were ADA compliant, and we found out quickly that more than 80% of the homepage was not.
Users didn’t feel included when browsing Audwell’s website. There were moments where users would pause the test confused on how the products would match their home. Audwell’s website lacked diversity in both settings and families.
What if my home doesn’t look like this?
Persona
Journey Map
Kelly’s scenario helped guide the team in a direction where we could implement empathy into a design so that users could have a satisfactory experience. To follow this, the team and I meticulously crafted a journey map with information from our interviews and competitive analysis to visually represent the steps users like Kelly took when seeking minimalist goods on an e-commerce site.
To discover the root of the problem, my team and I conducted more research over a week. We needed to understand better what entices users in their furniture shopping experience and how we could resolve the errors found during the preliminary usability test. With abundant online furniture retailers, an in-depth competitor analysis was utilized to shed light on weaknesses and highlight key benchmarks to decrease the abandonment rate for Audwell. Additionally, 1:1 user interviews and a survey that had 50 participants was included in the research. Based on user interviews and survey feedback, we created a persona to explore our users' goals and pain points while keeping an empathetic lens.
IDEATION
At this stage of the process, my co-lead and I ideated mid-fidelity wireframes in Figma to get a base of what our design would look like to users. We considered how minimalistic Audwell’s current designs were during this stage.
Wireframes
Home Page
Product Page
Blog Page
Reflecting on what our users and what our competitors demonstrated as successful, I knew we needed to create wireframes that were easy on the eyes and very simple to navigate through.
User Testing
Usability testing is always an exciting thing to observe. You can walk in with a prototype so confident users will ace it, but after the usability test is completed, you are quickly humbled. The team and I decided to use the testing tool Maze, and from this, we gathered 12 participants.
It was revealed that there needed to be major changes on the blog because it was nearly impossible for users to find articles about specific products. This is significant because Audwell only has three products currently, and with only this small amount of items, my co-lead and I knew we needed to craft something to optimize and highlight these furniture pieces on the blog.
With this informative test, the final prototype was fabricated into something that embodied Audwell and was also a product that users were comfortable with. Before finalizing the new prototype, my co-lead and I agreed to keep Audwell’s original colors; however, when we ran an accessibility test on Audwell’s current website, there were many pieces not very accessible. Therefore, I established a design UI system kit as a deliverable.
SOLUTION
My co-lead and I prototyped hi-fidelity wireframes of the fixed pain points users had faced on the original Audwell website. View the prototype below!
Iterations
We kept the signature greens from Audwell’s original website, but to make it ADA-compliant, we tweaked and added colors that allowed users an easier shopping experience. The search bar was moved down from the banner so users can find products easier, especially with Audwell planning to expand their product list.
Home page
Instead of having product information listed in paragraphs, we simplified the explorative part of shopping for users. There are now tabs where users can easily click for information.
Product Page
Blogs are no longer called guidebook, and users are able to now discover articles about products like Audwell’s famous towers. With the name change, we added a filtering option and made blogs larger so they are easier to locate.
Blog Page
CONCLUSION
Working on a redesign for Audwell was intimidating at first because their previous website was already aesthetically pleasing. This just meant that there were many opportunities for competitive analysis and interviews to guide how we could renovate Audwell’s existing website. By gaining a deeper understanding of competitors who sold similar products, my team and I were able to end up with a product that piqued the interest of users to stay and browse longer.
As for the next steps, I would like to observe more users who prioritize shopping online over in-store. By doing this, I can better understand the expectations when shopping on an e-commerce platform so I can continue to improve the experience for many users in the future.
You Made It!
Thank you for reading about Audwell!
If you enjoyed this experience, please click below to read about my next project.