Mapping out
Marketplace All
Marketplace All is a fictional business offered as a project to practice your design process on. I completed it for a UX Design course offered by SuperHi. It’s aim was to build an e-commerce website combining business goals with user needs.
Brief
The primary goal of Marketplace All is to bring different like-minded brands together in one place, so people can discover new things and save time when searching for furniture and objects for their homes. The business has a focus on design, quality and affordability. The intended target audience is middle-class adults living in urban areas, particularly those in creative industries — design, architecture, art, etc.
Marketplace All has no e-commerce however their target audience mainly shops digitally. So the enterprise is in need of a new platform - a responsive website that works on all browsers with a seamless checkout.
Branding is already supplied by a freelance designer. The branding keywords for Marketplace All are functional, playful and detail-oriented and should be present throughout the entire experience.
UI/UX and visual design: Elian Duits
Branding photos
Challenge
The assortment of products on Marketplace All are quite extensive and spread over multiple categories. And presumably, users have different ways of searching for products that they want. So the challenge is to help users find the products they’re looking for in a straightforward manner within Marketplace All’s extensive assortment.
User Journey
Personas
Research
Research began by sending multiple surveys to a wide group of users in order to provide a clear picture of the target audience. I distinguished three different groups within the target audience in terms of their goals and values.
First group is looking for efficiency and durability, the second prefers a single provider with a consistent style and the third group wants the best possible balance between price and quality.
This insight provided me with a clear vantage point from which to approach my designs.
Sitemapping
Analysis
What all three personas seem to have in common is that they all want products of high quality; few preferred lower prices if it meant the quality would suffer as a consequence. Which prompted me to use the feel of exclusivity throughout the designs.
The website should be equipped with a clear navigational structure with the assortment of products divided over four main categories. All other unrelated functions should be moved to the footer.
Wireframes
Paper prototype
Solutions
Creating a paper prototype of the wireframes enabled me to play around with the structure and flow of the website. Because it’s so minimalist yet interactive, it helped me find the best design solutions in the least amount of time.
The solution I found in this case is to design a navigation system equipped with an efficient filtering system. This would allow customers to find what they're looking for without getting lost in the large assortment of products.
As visual style, I wanted the website to look playful yet feel exclusive by applying bright colors that would compliment and accentuate the photos.
The website for Marketplace
