Skills utilized
UX research
competitive evaluation
researching user needs
content audit
site
mapping
prototype creation
cognitive walkthrough
UI design
scenario building
Web analytics
|
(2005)
Note: for confidentiality reasons, parts of
the interfaces have been obfuscated.
The company's shopping cart application was designed to help small store
owners put their stores online. When I was brought in,
their software wasn't doing as well as they had expected it to do. The
President of the company thought their application had all the features
it needed, but didn't know why it wasn't selling very well. He asked
me to work on the application and see if I could improve its standing
in the marketplace.
The top priority was to analyze and stabilize the software. Because
there was little or no documentation and the scripts themselves were
a mess, I started by mapping out the scripts within it. Once this
was done the software could be
re-architected to fit the standard patterns and bugs fixed with no
side effects. |
Shopping Cart Software Map
While stablizing the software, new features to add were discovered through
expert evaluation, brainstorming, and competitive analysis. While many
features were added, the two main ones were reporting and customization.
The customization options proved to be difficult to figure
out how to add, but a crucial one since it would allow non-developers to
establish the identity of their own stores. Our users were by far and large
a non-technical crowd and because of this virtually no computer terms or
language familiar to web developers could be used. However, we also wanted
to make sure that the store owners who did know HTML could still utilize
their skills to modify their store designs, if they desired.
Central Configuration Screen
To meet the customization needs a large number of parameters had to
be added. These parameters were divided into several sections: general,
front page/entryway, and product pages. For those that knew HTML, the ability
to add their own design was added.
But while customization proved to be an incredibly difficult to add, it
proved to be one of the most crucial features in having companies adopt
our software. As can be shown, our software allowed for a staggering number
of different storefronts to be created.
|
