An inuitive online shopping experience for the avid record collector.
Record Junkee is a vinyl music shop and live music venue in the heart of Sheffield, England. The shop is a beacon for independent music in the city and supporter of the vinyl revolution. I conducted a website redesign to assess the user experience of their website’s checkout process. I utilised the double-diamond design model to create a desktop-first website redesign in order to address the principal user pain points as well as some new opportunities that were uncovered through my research.
Record Junkee spent the past year re-opening the events space and live music venue to the public and as a result funnelled the majority of the marketing efforts into gig promotion. I wanted to discover its record collecting users' wants and needs in the end-to-end checkout process of the current site, as well as other independent and chain record stores nationally. My role was to improve the website experience based on research, with the intent to increase the CRO and grow the shop’s revenue outside of gig tickets.
A website that makes the e-commerce process easy, clean and accessible to ensure that users can complete their purchases and get back to what matters - the music.
From my findings and research insights, I detailed a two-tiered solutions that would consider the business’ constraints.
Implement recommendations from an heuristic evaluation & contextual inquiry on existing site.
Website re-design, incorporating data from interviews and other research.
I hypothesized that the website’s information architecture and search tools lack clarity and order, making product purchasing confusing and frustrating.
I started by focussing on the current website and looked for existing strengths as well as challenges that it faced. I undertook a heuristic analysis with element and features analyses not only for the client’s website but also comparing it to 8 competitors and 3 comparator companies, including bookstores.
I conducted usability testing to see if my assumptions were correct. I found that while the website was clean and initial visually appealing, there were several usability issues littered throughout. Several touchpoints were unclear and cause friction in the process, causing customers to leave the site long before making a vinyl purchase.
Contextual inquiry with 4 users showed that the majority of customers were prematurely leaving the site after reaching several ‘dead-ends’ on the homepage and product list pages. This was largely down to confusing titles of navigation items. To explore naming conventions in the navigation, I assembled key data from two card sorts. The first, an open sort, was comprised of 40 elements using menu items from the existing site. User could identify things like genres and event items. Discrepancy came with more ambiguous names including ‘Discogs’, as this is the brand name of a separate record e-commerce site that most users hadn't heard of. This confirmed that work needed to be done to clarify the top and secondary navigation so that users could more easily find what they were looking for.
Based on the data from the open sort, I wanted to test a proposed list of menu items that were less ambiguous versions of the most difficult-to-assign existing menu items. I tested 15 items across 4 areas of confusion with 8 users and found significantly higher levels of agreement across the naming conventions. I used these insights from the participant-centric analysis to help me to re-categorize all of the top and secondary navigation items. For instance, ‘new releases’ and ‘sale’ was created as new top navigation menu items in order to create a single-click link to the offers that the record store was pushing.
I conducted 4 user interviews and a survey with a further 12 users, to uncover what people want from the record store experience. As ¾ interviewees stated a preference for in-store shopping, I wanted to try to better replicate some of people’s favourite things about ‘in real life’ record store shopping such as recommendations and opportunities to discover something different,
I synthesized my findings and created an affinity map. From here I could ascertain the high-level problems and express these through the medium of a user persona. Estelle the Gen Z streamer is a user who is trying to purchase records quickly and easily. The pain points of the current experience are finding new music, arranging collection or delivery and wanting to shop all on one site. In designing the protoype, I had to bare Estelle's goals and frustrations in mind.
I created a prototype and conducted more usability testing. Feedback informed me that it was perceived as "beautiful" and "super intuitive". The main alterations to come out of this were:
I iterated my design based on discoveries made in user testing. From running first impression tests and vinyl purchasing based tasks, I was able to determine whether I had achieved my goals.
I took into account what had tested the best from the concept testing to create an MVP solution that would be clear, informative and welcoming. I found that users responded positively to the purchase flow and were able to find a record, add it to their basket and checkout without difficulty. Qualitative feedback complimented a 100% task completion success rate informed me that the flow was working.
“It looks like a friendly record store, I like it”
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Despite the tight timeline, I was able to create a tested significantly improved user experience. With more time, my next steps would be to:
1. Iterate on the design after a second round of user testing.
2. Develop a high-fidelity wireframe incorporating brand colours and informative copy.
3. Wireframe the rest of the website’s screen including the events tab and gig listings and gig ticket buying process and the venue hire, about us and contact us pages.
I'd love to hear from you, whether you want to discuss an opportunity to work together, or you just fancy a chat and a brew.
Copyright © 2022 by Christie Rossiter.
