The Opportunity:

Williams-Sonoma is an upscale chain offering high-end cookware, house-label kitchen accessories and gourmet goods. They are aspiring to build a superior relationship with their customers by giving them an experience beyond kitchen products they purchase. Their current website has poor navigation which prevents users' from finding relevant information.

My Solution:

My goal was to streamline the site navigation and attract users by allowing them to:

• Easily find new culinary skills and top-quality products.
• Search and book cooking classes in their city.
• Provide a social platform to communicate and share ideas and recipes with other cooks.

My Role:

This being an individual project, I

• Conducted domain, organizational, user research and heuristic evaluation.
• Created persona, user story, journey map, storyboard and various user and task flows.
• Sketched layouts, built wireframes and tested prototypes for usability testing

Research

Organizational Research

I started learning more about Williams-Sonoma's founding and corporate values that guides their actions and decisions. I found their mission is to enhance the quality of their customers’ lives at home. From their people to their products, quality is their signature. Williams-Sonoma has a great range of top quality products and lot of useful information.

Unfortunately, their poorly designed website frustrates users and prevents them from finding what they are looking for and they turn elsewhere.

Domain and User Research

For better understanding of the market, I prepared a competitive and comparative analysis of Williams-Sonoma and its competitors. I studied similar kitchen stores, other cooking classes and online retailers to understand the different opportunities available to the users in the existing market.

I also performed Neilsen heuristic evaluation and task analysis of Williams-Sonoma's current website and its competitors' websites to evaluate their usability.

User Interviews

I screened 20 people, out of which I interviewed 8 participants(on phone and in person) to study

• Their desires and frustrations when purchasing kitchen products online or in-store.
• Their interest in cooking and what would motivate them to take cooking classes.
• The relationship they would like to build with stores like Williams-Sonoma.

Planning

Proto-persona

The Affinity diagram helped me build my primary persona Jeff Smith.

Customer Journey Map

I created a User-Journey map aligning the persona's actions at different stages with his emotions to understand his pain-points and needs at various points. This helped me identify and focus on possible opportunities.

Design Framework and Sketches

Williams-Sonoma's current website makes it difficult for users to find cooking class information. It has too many options and menu bars on the home page confusing the user with the navigation. My goal was to bring clarity and discipline to the website's structure and user flows.

I used card sorting to start building the website structure which led to concept maps. Concept map helped me organize and connect different segments of the website. This formed the basis of a site map which allowed me to visually categorize the information into sections and link them together.

Modeling a user-flow helped me understand how the navigation of site worked and if it met the target users' needs and business goals.

After working on my user flows, I started sketching different layouts on paper for content strategy and developed them into detailed wireframes using sketch.

Prototype

I used Invision to convert the wireframes into a prototype.

Usability Testing

First round of Usability Testing on wireframes. Total Participants: 4

• All participants felt the website was straightforward and had a clean design.
• The global navigation was obvious and easy to use.
• 3 participants successfully managed to book a class and find a particular product whereas 1 struggled with finding the BOOK button for classes.
• I also noticed participants hesitate when browsing classes by skill first or location.

Heuristic Evaluation:

Early assessmemnt of the existing system in the process helps learning the design flaws and drawbacks that need to be adddressed thus giving a direction towards corrective measures.

Information Architecture:

Organizing the information and structure of the website in a simple and effective manner thus making it useful and usable for the user. Site maps and Concept maps are useful techniques to build the information heirarchy and interrelation of content.