Introduction:
Surface is a salon brand hair product company. They have great products but, not so great website.
Objective:
Redesign the Surface Hair website
Processes Involved:
- Heuristic Evaluation
- Competitor Analysis
- Business Goals
- User Goals
- Personas
- Content Evaluation
- Information architecture
- Wireframe
- Interactive Prototype
1. Heuristic Evaluation
Identified usability problems using the evaluation principles by Jacob Neilson. The evaluation was conducted using the below checklist in which the 10 heuristic evaluation points are further broken down into questions.
http://www.stcsig.org/usability/topics/articles/he-checklist.html.
2. Competitor Analysis
Comparison between the Surface hair website and Kevin Murphy’s (another salon brand):
- Kevin Murphy(KM) website is designed as per the latest website trend.
- KM has limited menu options thus highlighting on the products and the brand. Surface has lot more menu options hence too much clutter.
- Sign In option in KM is at the top right corner for salon professionals. Whereas, Surface opens up a new window and the menu options are not accessible without logging in.
- The Salon locator at KM website is available at the header of the website and in Surface website it is a menu tab.
- Search functionality is not available in the Surface website.
3. Business Goals
- Increase Revenue: How to attract more consumers to use our products, how to involve more salon professionals and distributors to sell our products.
- Expanding into new locations: Franchising the products into new locations, new salons in different countries.
- Increase happy customers: The quality of the products should impress the customers thus increasing the professionals using our products. Better customer satisfaction will result in better word of mouth advertising and more loyal customers.
- Support the community: Support charitable events and encourage the salon professionals to donate time to serve the community.
- Encourage Green initiative: Provide a culture of nurturing and respecting the environment.
- Provide Educational programs: Encourage the college program and educate more and more salon experts.
4. Users Goals
- The users are further categorized into - Salon Professional Users and End Consumers.
End Consumers:
- Browse product offerings and identify the salons who sell these products and use it.
- Browse the website to get to know about the products and the ingredients used.
- Look for salons using Surface products
- Read reviews about the products
Salon Professional Users:
- Browse product offerings and sign up for becoming a surface salon
- Enroll for the surface college program
- Browse through the tips and techniques offered by Surface
- Enroll to become an educator
- Enroll to their rewards program
- Request for Surface Promotionals
- Read reviews about the products
5. Personas
- Primary Persona: Salon Professional Users
- Secondary Person: End Consumers
6. Content Evaluation
Identified all the tasks in the current website. Categorized the tasks for a better site-flow.
7. Information Architecture
Structured the contents of the website based on the task categorization.
8. Wireframe
Sketched wireframes on the paper before working on the prototypes
9. Prototype
Below is the link for the interactive (high fidelity) prototype created in AXURE.
http://63ns47.axshare.com/home.html
The prototype includes pages - Home, Products, Welcome and About Us.
New Surface Home Page
Sign-Up page - on clicking on the Sign-Up hyperlink the top right of the header
Conclusion:
The website was redesigned so that:
- Prominent features of the website are displayed in the Home page.
- Search functionality and Salon Locator is easily accessible by including in the header of every page.
- Registeration/ Sign-up process for the salon professionals is made easy with the Register/Sign-up link on the header of every page and with few questionnaires.
Note:
This is a self-assigned project and the evaluation and the redesign was done based on research on the Surface product and their current website.
