Long Story Short
CarpetCall is an Australian flooring retailer that sells a range of carpets, rugs, blinds, vinyls and timber flooring. With the Australian mobile market growing, I was part of a design and development team that were tasked with redesigning their website to make it mobile-friendly and responsive.
My main role was to analyse and take the requirements gathered by the SEO and account team and redesign the site from wireframe to interface stage. Take a look at this project below.
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Research
I took the initiative and used some of my allocated hours to learn more about the market, product, target audience and competition to better understand what I was designing for. I also conducted a usability assessment on the existing site to audit major issues that needed to be addressed in this project. I also conducted some lean user interviews to validate some assumptions I had about tackling some of the design challenges.
See a simplified version of the results and data I worked with in the slides below.
*Made specifically for this case study.
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User Experience
Working with the data the SEO team collected (e.g. analytics, keyword research) and some of my own research, I was able to work out some of the user flows and review it with the account team. After getting it signed off, the team continued with the first version of the wireframes.
No prototyping was conducted as the client was focused more towards the design phase. As such, I did some guerrilla testing on family and friends to validate a few user flows in the wireframe stage.
Design
We wanted to refresh the CarpetCall look and feel to make it feel more modern. We took the primary colours off the logo that had a brighter blue and red and allocated them to our palette.
Conclusion
This project was challenging as we did not have direct access to both the client and the clients’ users. I personally learned a lot about the process of working with remote teams, and the complexity in the interactions in eCommerce sites.
I’d like to highlight two things that had the most impact to my UX/UI career and creative process:
Research and User Validation is Important
“Give me six hours to chop down a tree and I will spend the first four sharpening the axe.”
UX was still relatively “new” to our development process, but I am glad that I took the time to understand the market and users more. At the end of the day, I was redesigning the website FOR the users. It was important to understand and validate assumptions we made, both qualitative (interviews and testing) and quantitative (SEO analysis), as well as presenting this back to stakeholders. Some of this was unchartered territory for me, and I will be adding new techniques and knowledge I gained into my arsenal for future projects.
Don’t underestimate the importance of walkthroughs.
I feel like we could have done more in regard to guiding the client and having direct access to them, particularly in presenting the designs. The team had to spend quite a lot of time documenting what each functionality did when a walkthrough would help the client understand the whole process more. Better management and advocacy for the user with the client is something I will strive for in my next project.
