Overview

Eso Won Books is one of the largest black-owned bookstores in the nation. Located in the heart of LA, they focus on their role in the community and not just selling books by hosting different events and celebrations, raising awareness of black history and achievements.

However, their website does not represent the significant value they bring nor how big and important their business is.

The goal is to redesign the website to accommodate the basic needs of a specific target user.

Team: Solo project I Time: 2-week sprint, July 2020

Operating a business through a pandemic 

For this study to be successful I’d have to create an affinity map to understand the business and user needs.

I conducted secondary research to understand the current business model and how are they operating during the COVID pandemic to set realistic goals.

These are the main insights I’ve found:

Who’s our user? What do they want?

For this study, we focused on a specific target user that’s looking for the best deals and prices and doesn’t mind spending the extra time to find the right deal for them. We’ll call them “Deal Diver”

By knowing the persona, the next step was to know their needs and goals to see how can I align them with the insights from the business side.

I also conducted secondary research, here are my main insights:

From there it was a matter of putting the pieces together and seeing where can we align the needs to come up with our focus points/ features.

What features to start with?

By focusing mainly on the intersected goals from the affinity map I was able to land on the 3 main tasks I’ll be focusing my design on:

1- Adding a curbside pickup service.

2- Applying coupons/ promotions policy.

3- Introducing different Means of delivery/ different prices.

Heuristics

Evaluating the current website was very important to understand the main pain points and what areas I can focus on that’d align with our 3 main tasks.

So what’s the problem?!

Our target users are not able to find the best deals they’re looking for because the current website doesn’t meet their expectations. It actually pushes them away by not  showing best prices/ savings & overwhelming them with too much unnecessary information under each book/ product.

What else is out there? (online bookstores competitors)

I then conducted a competitive analysis to understand how other e-commerce platforms for bookstores are addressing some of the features we’re implementing in our design.

I focused my comparison’s features on the main pain points that I’ve got from the heuristic evaluation in addition to the features we’re implementing.

Since we have a specific target user “deal diver” and we know their needs, I searched for online bookstores that focus on the same target user’s needs.

What else is out there? (e-commerce comparators) 

For me to gain a wider perspective on how the e-commerce platforms work especially for the checkout process and the curbside pick-up feature giving the covid pandemic, I’ve conducted a comparators analysis.

How are we fixing the problem?

We believe that by focusing on promotion deals & prioritizing the savings/ used books categories in addition to simplifying the user’s checkout experience we will be seeing an increase in traffic and purchases by 10-13% within 6-8 weeks from launching the new website.

Rearranging the website

Through my study and analysis to the competitive/ comparative e-commerce platforms, I was able to come up with a site map that would help the user reach their goals and makes the happy path much easier to find.

 The big reveal

Having all the pieces of the puzzle together it was time to sketch some ideas and build the prototype