A Website Navigation Redesign

Strand’s Bookstore is an iconic bookstore in lower Manhattan. I was asked to assess the usability and functionality of the website. The specific outcome was a proposed change in the navigation of the website that would improve the experience of the people who use it.

Roles: UX Researcher | Information Architect

UXD Artifacts

Heuristic Analysis
Competitive/Comparative Analysis
Card Sorting
Tree Testing
Fast Prototyping
Usability Testing
User/Task Flows
Site Mapping

UXD Tools

inVision
optimalworkshop

Other Skills

ER-Modeling
SQL
Excel

Discovery

Analyze the Website

My first milestone in this project was to get a good understanding of the website and its shortcomings in light of sound UX practices and methods. I decided to visit the actual store and get a first impression of its contents and aesthetic as a baseline to evaluate and compare to the site, before I dove in the actual research.

HEURISTIC ANALYSIS

Abby Covert suggests to search for empathy to the users by “wearing user goggles’ i.e try to see the website as they would in relation with their particular goals/needs. I used a buyer archetype to frame and focus this evaluation and proceeded to review the website using her 10 points heuristic evaluation. This is the summary.

COMPETITIVE/COMPARATIVE ANALYSIS

I also conducted a feature analysis to gather information related to custom functionality offered by online bookstores and determine if important functionality was missing from Strand’s website and to get an idea of what made it different

These evaluations revealed that Strand’s website does not reflect the unique nature of this store and what makes it so special and iconic. Here are the main takeaways from this analysis.

The wording of the menu options is unusual and confusing
The pages are crowded and distracting
The unique services that the store offers are not well represented in the site

Understand the Users’s Mental Model

Card Sorting

I conducted open and closed card sorting sessions using actual cards and optimalworkshop.com

Because of the amount of data that I was able to collect and the limitations of my account level in optimalworkshop I decided to use my software development skills and load the data into an ER database. From there I extracted data to .csv files and created my own versions of a standardization grid and similarity matrix using excel. Then using that data I started pairing labels that appeared together in these structures and used the clusters that were formed as the basis for the proposed site map.

As a final step in my discovery I created a task flow for finding and buying a book and a site map. I show “Before/After” versions of them below in the design section of the case.