Case study : Maynooth — an e-furniture store
First thing’s first. I am neither calling this a Ui/Ux project nor a Ux project but a UI project only.
Well, that’s simple because I have not done any of the Ux part for this project. Thanks to Daniel.
This was part of the course I took up for Adobe XD on Udemy. And the amazing instructor — Daniel Walter Scott had (apparently) done the user research and had come up with a persona for Maynooth furniture — a concept business selling affordable high end design furniture. This e-commerce website is for people to browse and purchase furniture.
Well, of-course I took the liberty of designing the app for it as well.
User Persona
Our persona is a 50 year old woman based in Dublin, Ireland.
The first thing that caught my eye was that she was 50 years old!
50 years old. So, here’s what was going through my mind when I saw it:
- She’s may/may not be a tech savvy person.
- Her goal would be pretty straight forward — to make a purchase and leave.
- She will have a tough time navigating the website and the app if is complex.
This made me realize that I couldn’t experiment with design nor use the latest UI trends.
I had to KISS — Keep It Simple Stupid.
Being my first project, this was rather a big limitation (not using the latest UI trends). But I was up for the challenge.
The sad part was that when I did a competitor analysis, I realized that I couldn’t use the layout styles that they have. My persona would just not go about if so.
Wireframes
Frankly speaking, I did not take the time and effort to go in search of a wireframing tool. Used XD straight up for that. Although pen and paper is my favorite wireframing tool.
Yup. Blue and white. Quite an odd selection of colors for wireframes. Pardon me.
I did keep it simple. Everything about the website and the app is pretty straight forward and I was sure Katherine will not have a problem navigating the application.
Hi-fi mockup
Color was the next hurdle in my way. After a few iterations and trial and errors, I zeroed on a somewhat dark brown as seen below
A lot of digging was done on websites like unsplash and pexels (these were my sources for free stock images) to find images that went well with the colors used already.
Also, after a lot of thinking I came up with titles for the hero slider. I felt that this was quite an important thing to be considered as it has a huge role to play in the user’s first impression of the website.
The one thing that I am proud of in the web version of the design is that I went pretty deep. Be it designing the forgot password flow or the error 404 page.
Be it the rating of the experience or prototyping the footer of the page.
Yeah, I did it all.
You can notice that KISS principle has been followed for the mobile screens also.
Although I took quite sometime, about 3 months or so to complete this simple project, I am happy with the outcome for it is portfolio worthy.
That wraps up my first case study.
If this article interested you in any way, check out the design on Behance.
I look forward to doing many such projects and concentrate more on UX there.
Cheers!
P.S — The Udemy course and the instructor I spoke about in the beginning was purely out of admiration and not promotion. I’m definitely not getting paid for it (I wish I was!).
Good day y’all.
