A purpose led brand that promotes artisanal craftsmanship. The site features a collection of sustainably-sourced, ethically-made pieces ranging from home décor to fashion accessories.
Product Designer (team of 4)
6 weeks
Brands get frustrated when sourcing artisanal products from Africa. The communication between buyers and suppliers in the artisan craft sector who want to purchase wholesale quantities is cumbersome. The manual administrative process involved in sourcing and managing the process is outdated. There are many kickbacks, which results in suppliers earning less and middlemen gaining a higher margin.
The first thing we focused on was our research strategy. In order to identify the flaws in the current UX and UI, we conducted a usability test by interviewing people that fit our user archetype. These were owners of small businesses, who are looking for suppliers, preferably from Africa. Before we began our interviews we first needed to do two things.
As part of our Competitor Analysis, we conducted an analysis on four websites with similar product offerings to SAFI Label. These were: Urban Zen, Goodee, Powered by People, and Novica.
We focused our research on Site Map, User Interface elements and User Experience Flows – including the Sign Up process, Check Out Process, Browsing, and the Features.
Strengths
Call to action button is clearly visible
Search results display items with pricing, details
Organized gallery layout with product images
Weaknesses
On the landing page, very hard to read the paragraph text with the images as background
The decorative font is hard to read at times when there’s a busy background
Font varies from regular to bold. Needs to be consistent
Action Items
Include an option to order large quantities of a product
Clear, stand out a call to action buttons
Incorporate hover action over product image (when
gallery layout) to quickly add to cart
To start off, I created a provisional persona of potential SAFI users based on a selection of current SAFI users and my understanding of people I knew that used wholesale websites.
Owner of small business
Fashion, art, and craft
To find suppliers of raw materials for their art and craft
Being able to monitor order online
After feedback from user interviews and competitive usability testing, I created three lightweight user personas for SAFI Label based on their different shopping behaviors:
Want to find a new source of artisanal products. Origin of the products are not as important as the quality and value.
Goals:
Want to find supply sources that provide unique materials. Willing to pay a premium price for premium quality.
Goals:
Want to find artisans from her origin. Willing to pay more to support her hometown and promote her traditional designs.
Goals:
After doing guerilla usability testing with our candidates, we reviewed the recordings and used affinity mapping to group the pain points into similar categories, which came down to the below HMW question:
I first created a sitemap to structure the MVP content. Besides having a list of products, and information about the company, I added featured products, gift guides, and artisans’ information to the menu.
We identified the 3 red routes for this website:
Included a mega dropdown menu into the design. This allows quicker results for users, especially since Safi has many products.
Top panel with short blurb and CTA, following with story panel to introduce SAFI backstory.
When click on Account button, the page will take the user to sign in/ sign up page.
Grid view for all artisans
Option to search for artisans with filters and sort option.
Artisan profile page provides stories, products, reviews, and option to contact for custom order.
Grid view of all products and filters. A CTA for custom order is placed below the filters side panel.
Besides details about the product, there are sections that link to the artisan, more product from the artisan, and more product that user might like.
Once the item is in the cart, the user can start placing the order with the process of putting in information and get confirmation.
We performed usability testing on 5 users who fit the persona. There were 5 tasks during the testing:
Below are key takeaways from our usability testing.
Would like to have breadcrumbs to go back to previous find.
User 1 - Search for products
Able to search for desired artisans.
User 2 - Search for Artisans
Able to place custom order from various locations. Would love to have pre-filled options when placing order.
User 3 - Custom Order
Would like to be able to track orders.
User 4 - Tracking Order
Would like to have an account view to see history of orders, save account profile, etc...
User 5 - Profile Page
After analyzing the usability testing notes, we made changes to the wireframes and incorporated the style guide to bring forth the Hi-fi prototype. Below are the before and afters of our key screens.
Removing bullets in the listing detail. Update new fonts and logos.
Apply Google and Facebook button styles.
Listing the badges of socially and ethically conscious values/artisan missions. This adds a solution to the statement in the brief mentioning Safi’s aim to connect socially and ethically conscious consumers to artisans.
Breadcrumbs are added to help go back to the search page.
Apply photos on the homepage, and changed the content overlay.
Added the artisan’s specific areas of design. This will ease the experience buyers/consumers have when searching for products to purchase wholesale
Changed from black text to white text overlay. Updated the filter list and adding visual.
Updated the filter and custom order CTA
Custom order form with more visual and verbiage updated.
What are the outstanding accessibility issues that we want to address? For example, will users of the webstie validate that the skills and badges aspect of the website is useful? The people I interviewed liked the feature but did not note a personal need for it.
How will we create a seamless experience for users to track all of their orders?
How will we encourage users to engage with the website?
I plan to integrate a profile page that provides all needed information to the users such as order history, point system, and message portal to talk to artisans or SAFI customer service.