Designed an online store for a local independent STEAM toy shop
JAN 2018—FEB 2018
Little Einstein is a website of curated and innovative learning kits and toys for kids based out of Brooklyn, NY. It was formerly a retail store in the neighborhood of Park Slope, Brooklyn but due to rising costs the owners wanted to convert their store to a web-only store and wanted to focus their inventory on products geared towards kids ages 4 - 15. The primary goal for the website is to become the #1 resource for parents that want to incorporate hands on STEAM (Science, Technology, Engineering, Math, Art + Design) education into their child’s everyday learning experience.
Role: We were a team of 3 UX Designers and Strategists and I was primarily responsible for creating low to high fidelity prototypes and interface design. We collaborated on all research, planning and user testing.
We spent some time understanding the goals for the project and we framed the key design goals we wanted to achieve:
We set out to explore the toy stores in Brooklyn, in search of answers. Our team set out in different directions of the city to ask questions to the toy store owners, parents and other customers. Our starting point was Downtown Brooklyn and we visited toy stores in the surrounding neighborhoods of Park Slope, Brooklyn Heights, Prospect Heights, South Slope and Cobble Hill. We used all the data we gathered to draw comparisons with our competitors to analyze the user experience of their customers.
We then translated our interviews to create user personas to better understand our target consumer base. We chose to create four different personas - a parent buying toys for her kids, a grandma buying toys for her grandchildren, a tween buying products for themselves, and an uncle shopping for his niece and nephew. These personas cover all the different user types that would be visiting the website.
Based on all our research and insights, we created a sitemap of the website with all the various sections.
After deciding the features that we wanted to keep on the website and consulting with some potential users, we created a low fidelity prototype by sketching out all the different sections of the website. After making the prototype, each member of the group set out to test it with a variety of users.
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We tested our prototype with 15 potential users. The feedback we gathered helped us design our next prototype. Some of the insights from our testing:
I then designed a mid fidelity prototype in Sketch from the feedback received in the user testing session. We decided to test it using an InVision clickthrough prototype. Some of the new features to test for were:
We tested our prototype with 10 potential users. I incorporated all the feedback in creating the designs for the high fidelity version. Some of the feedback we received:
After testing a prototype created in InVision, I proceeded to create high fidelity mockups and prototype which was then handed off to our client for development with all our documentation. I also added some animations and microinteractions.
This project gave me insights into designing for e-commerce and considerations to make when designing for a niche audience. We wanted to build a functional coded prototype in order to test how people interact with the site better and gather data on usage patterns. Due to the time limitations and other constraints for the project we were unable to do that. We also couldn't run A/B tests for different ways for filtering the toys and the listings. Given more time, I would have also done more research into successful independent online stores and interview their owners.