The Treasure Chest (a fictitious brick & mortar toy store in San Francisco) is a retailer of toys, games, and magic tricks. For over 30 years it has successfully focused on traditional toys, but have moved with the times and now offers a full range of new and vintage products to appeal to children and adults alike. The shop specializes in sourcing the most cherished items from everyone’s childhood, making long-forgotten things available today - as if they had been stored in a treasure chest all these years!
Project DetailsTimeline
2 weeks Design Team
Solo Project Tools
Sticky Notes, Pen & Pencil, Sketch3, Invision |
The ChallengeThrough their new website, Treasure Chest wants to showcase its products, while maintaining the brand image of tradition, fun, and creativity. Unlike e-commerce retailers such as Amazon, The Treasure Chest offers a highly-curated inventory focusing on hand-picked quality over quantity.
The OutcomeBy incorporating the experience of “little wins” and “user is never wrong” mentality into my design, I’ve designed a toy e-commerce website that share the same experience of shopping in the physical brick & mortar toy store.
Information ArchitectureCard sorting helped me understand how people categorized toys. An important insight I uncovered while doing open and closed card sorting was that people categorized toys by size and how you play with the toy itself. One of the examples were that people went to Games when searching for classic board games or educational toys. This insight helped guide my information architecture for the site.
Personas & Affinity DiagramsWe were provided with three personas from our fictitious clients. All three personas ranged from different wants/needs/pain points. In order for me to design an e- commerce site that will cover all three personas, I created an affinity diagram to pull out the bigger insights of these personas. From this activity, I was able to answer all three persona’s wants & needs by seeing what the overarching insight was in each category.
Don't reinvent the wheelCombining all my research and having an idea to start sketching with, I decided to do some competitve & comparative analysis on different e-commerce websites. See what works, what doesn’t work and who are the big players in this field. This helped me stay away from unnecessary features and layout of designing a new site.
Feedback & IterationSketching out paper prototypes and having users test the flow helped me in the end, create a seamless, intuitive e-commerce experience for people shopping on an online toystore. Next steps would be to continue to flesh out contextual inquiries on my designed site and see where opportunities could make the experience better.
Wireframes |