"Bringing Nostalgia To Your Desktop"
What its like to give it a go
Case study
Role: UX research, Information Architect, Visual Designer
Duration: 2 weeks
SUS Score: 87.7%
Creator
ME
The Problem:
Although Spin cycle is one of Seattle’s most raved about nostalgic, multimedia stores, they don't have a way for customers to buy or view their inventory online, causing them to miss out on the large outside revenue market, thus causing long terms users who can no longer make it into the physical shop to take their business somewhere that sells online. Which then turns the once nostalgic experience of record shopping to just another monopoly of corporate racket.
Goal:
The goal i wanted to achieve through creating this function was to design and create an e-commerce function to the already existing Spin Cycle website, while keeping the nostalgic and retro touch to their brand and striving to keep their business statement true, “Best of all we strive for THE BEST prices on all your favorite pieces hoping to create a cohesive and new experience to spin cycle.
Why the project was important:
This project was important to me for a few reasons. I found it meaningful to shine a light on the “dying” industry of records, vintage games, and DVD’s and do my best attempt to give them a chance to tap into the more modern aspect of online shopping. In addition I decided to choose this store because you don't come across many of them anymore; since we can get essentially anything online, it’s taken away from that sense of connection you get when physically shopping, a big part of the vintage media experience does take part through physically shopping , so my goal was to connect the nostalgia in the most cohesive way that I could.
The steps:
I covered a large amount of bases while creating this project. Bellow is a list of all completed
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Organizational Research
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A Project summary
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Screener Survey/ user interviews/ affinity mapping
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Competitive Analysis
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A Heuristic Analysis
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Task Analysis
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Concept map
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Create a Persona
8. User Stories/ scenarios A use case
9. User Journey
10. Storyboarding
11. Create a Sitemap
12. User Flows
13. Content Inventory
14. Sketches
15. Wireframing
Take a trip with me through the deliverables I created for this nostalgic project!
Affinity Map
Creating an affinity map is one of my favorite parts of the UX design process I find the ability to take statements from multiple user and find trends within them to be extremely interesting. For the project I conducted a screener to narrow down the audience of who I was designing for to be passionate record/ vintage media users. I did that because through an on site interview The owner of the shop informed me that it was mostly people who had an extreme passion for the music and vintage art that were keeping his shop afloat.
After finding good candidates as my target audience the three main findings I chose to focus in on for this project were,
1. 'I search by genre"
2."I feel a sense of nostalgia"
3. "I feel like online shopping could widen the lens of the experience
Competitive Analysis
The purpose behind doing competitive analysis is to better understand how your competitors already presenting them selves to ensure your not missing any key functions or not producing a "future-forward" enough design. I was determined to find out how to go above and beyond for SpinCycle. My findings fro doing this competitive analysis were crucial to finding areas in with the current website were lacking. The most important being that the current design for SpinCycle did not have an e-commerce function so implementing that was going to be a massive redesign!
Heuristic Evaluation:
Persona
Creating a heuristic evaluation is important to evaluate the level of functionality the website gives, I measured that by using the LEMERS method, which is an acronym for learnability, efficiency, memorability,
error management, and satisfaction.
SpinCycle Seattle had a lot of room for growth and I was determined to make the most positive impact possible.
For this project creating a persona came almost naturally to me not because I myself am a fan of vintage media collecting but because looking back at it I seemed to be constantly surrounded by it with family and friends, I knew what they were interested in and what they cared about and my findings in my user interviews seemed to hold true. Meet Monty a 30-something old seatleite who has a passion for old school records and video games, he is a busy sound designer who doesn't have a lot of time anymore to go record shopping in stores, so he is looking for a new way to go about supplying his media.
Task Analysis
Moving on to how the process of the e-commerce function steps would actually be mapped out. I created a few scenarios to walk through, but above is a "general" analysis of steps for the process of buying a piece of vintage media online. Trying to keep the users as interested as possible by creating a small amount of tasks from browsing to buying.
User Journey
Above is an image of the customer journey map that i had created for this project, If I haven't said it before I AM A HUGE FAN of this tool! Looking at the emotions of users in every part of your design is essential to being able to create the right ideas for the right reasons. They help you clearly see the "happy" and "not so happy" paths through the life cycle of designs you are implementing. From my findings a few user pain points that could arise are all during the waiting phase, like many of us our patience is wearing thin with the idea of instant gratification, with that in mind I knew I had to connect a way to see delivery and shipping times to be as transparent as possible, on top of crafting a kick ass e-commerce function for all vintage media lovers.
The Concept Map
Creating a concept map is
something I have mentioned before
as an essential touchstone during your design process. The ability to look at
the ideas you've deemed as most
important for a successful project to
keep yourself in check. concept maps
give you your essential needs all in one place.
For this project in specific the most important topics to stay true to while designing where to keep that sense of nostalgia throughout the buying process as well as the strength of community that has been so beautifully built throughout the years.
The Infamous Sitemap
The use of a sitemap better helps you understand where all your sites content will live, you can "map" out all contents by putting them in buckets along the said navigation where one would find the information. For this project my top nav menu included the following!
"Buy vinyl" "Buy Games", "Buy movies" "Locations", "Connect with us", "Your account", and lastly "Cart". You can follow the map to see all the genres of what movies, vinyls, and games, as well as other popular ways that people seemed to shop by.
Next Steps
To continue on with this project I have accumulated a list of next steps i've deemed important to the success of this e-commerce function. Top of the list would be to generate enough funding to make this viable in back end development. For things more in my control I find it important to make the visual design of this project more on brand and extremely nostalgic without making the website look outdated and old, I would hope to accomplish that by doing more user testing to ensure that from the users ends that is being achieved. This project taught me a lot about my goals and skills that i am capable of in a short 2 weeks, from completing the lifecycle from start to finish of the UX process. I was extremely humbled by the support and gratitude given by the owner and employees of SpinCycle Seattle and it is an experience I am forever be thankful for.
