Read-It-Again is a secondhand bookstore local to the city I grew up in. They're known for their family-oriented practices and ability to trade-in as well as purchase used books. They host events frequently for all age groups and genres and also host several clubs for their customers to engage with.
This project was assigned through the UX Academy of Design Lab, in which I was responsible for research, UX/UI design, and asset creation.
This project spanned two weeks, in which I worked alone and acted as the user experience researcher and the user interface designer.
In order to find the best way to organize Read-It-Again's website, I took a look at several competitors' websites. Then, to create a persona that best suited Read-It-Again's audience, I conduced interviews with individuals who had traded their possessions in and/or participated in secondhand shopping.
To determine what to build out for the wireframes and eventual prototype, I created a sitemap and user flows. These assets also helped to better inform the preliminary organization of the website.
Had I not been on such a strict timeline, I would have conducted a card sort to see how users might have organized the site. Unfortunately, given the time constraint, I used patterns I noticed when comparing competitors' websites in the earlier Research phase to create the sitemap. This step proved to have an effect on the user testing phase later down the line.
I first began by listing the major pages of the website and attempted categorizing them with a mindmap. I refined the mindmap before realizing this information was best delivered in a venn diagram.
Based on the sitemap and notes I took from the interviews, I was able to create task and user flows.
With the sitemap and flows complete, I moved onto wireframing the site. I built out the desktop site first before building the mobile and tablet sites. I focused on creating pages relevant to the user and task flows.
To facilitate the creation of the prototype, I made a UI kit.
After finishing the prototype, I reached out through several platforms to find participants for the user test. A test plan was created and was summarized in my findings as well:
To organize the results and find patterns that would inform what tweaks to make to iterations, I made an affinity map of the participants' comments.
Given the time crunch, new iterations of the prototype with further user testing could not be performed. If I'd had more time, the next steps would have been:
Prototyping took the longest (a total of 20 hours) due to the huge number of screens and connections. I had to stop early in order to meet deadlines. In the future, number of screens needs to be taken into account when forming the project timeline.User recruiting, interviewing, and testing took the second-longest, which was not unexpected.
