During summer 2022, I worked as a UI/UX Design Intern at Above & Beyond Studios, an e-commerce company who advocates for local small businesses and encourage people to shop small.
Freedom is Above & Beyond Studios' e-commerce website, they help businesses with store listing, advertisement, promote and sell their products.
The current website of Above & Beyond Studio has a low amount of registered account and a high rate of uncompleted check-outs and no-action views.
During my onboarding week, I observed that the old website has three other issues:
We started off with a very broad question and knew that we need more specific goals for us to get to the solutions. So we started to do more research and dive deeper into what customers are really looking for when shopping small.
We map out the site to quickly learn the current patterns and user flow and functions.
Then I did a competitor analysis to learn about the difference between shopping platforms.
I took Amazon and Esty to do a comparison of their features and user interfaces.
I then talked to people who shop small to understand their motivation of shopping small.
Some traits of our customers includes having great sense of community, seeking niche and unique products and expecting a personal story behind the business.
From user research and competitor analysis we concluded that by improving user engagement and conveying values that resonate with users, we will have enhance the user experience, hence furthermore lead customers to sign up to our website.
I was in charge of designing the "product browsing" pages and "about us"pages.
And I'll focus on these for ideation and just show the big decisions we had.
I came up with multiple concepts about how we can emphasize our value and increase interactivity of the website.
After some deliberation, we decided to focus on adding social proof and personalize the shopping experience. We found that other ideas does not have enough recognition and might be too time-consuming to implement.
I then decided to explore more ways to interactive with shop owners on the website. And this is the final design we landed on:
There will be a story feature for store owners to provide more background stories for customers
Customers can interact with the story using the button below!
For the onboarding experience, I tried out different ways to guide customers to select preference
After discussing these 2 concepts with team members, we decided to move forward with the first option. We would use chips to display categories, since we can save up screen space and avoid overwhelming the users.
I developed a click-through prototype on Figma to conduct usability tests internally to uncover any high-level issues or concerns.
I set goals and assumptions for my testing and designed several tasks in the prototype, observed users completing the tasks through screen sharing on zoom, and asked for feedback at the end.
With the feedback I got, I incorporated some suggestions into the final design. I also learned more about our customers' preference, this process really motivated me of be thoughtful of the business goals and user goal.
Here are our goals for the About Us pages:
When creating the "About Us" pages, I took a more visual approach. This allowed me to highlight the company's values and mission through images and graphics, making the website more clear and visually appealing while still staying true to the company's branding.
Unfortunately, I can't share my process here, but if you're interested in learning more about how I incorporated branding into the design, feel free to reach out to me!
conduct more comprehensive user testing to verify each of our design choices.
As a designer, it's crucial for me to develop the ability to work within constraints. Whether it's time limitations, budgetary restrictions, or technical limitations, I must learn how to navigate these obstacles and still deliver effective design solutions that meet the project requirements.
