Bowen’s Furniture

Overview

Bowen’s is a hypothetical modern furniture company that strives to provide quality furniture for a mature audience with a keen eye for interior design. The challenge is to create a website that will inspire the creatives to have a vision of what their home space can look like and lead them through a user-friendly guide to each product category so they can make a confident purchasing decision. 

Role

Product Designer

Bowen's Furniture is a solo project resulting from an online course in which I was responsible for the following: 

  • Conducting preliminary research to get an understanding of the scope of the project and the target market

  • Building a user persona to model the target market's fundamental interests, behavior, and expectations

  • Developing a competitive analysis based on other Furniture and interior design websites that the target market uses  

  • Rapid rough sketching was involved in brainstorming solutions to the problem area

  • Sitemaps were developed to organize the structure of the website

  • A mid-fidelity prototype was designed to further solidify the more robust ideas from the sketching phase 

  •  A high-fidelity pixel-sharp model was created with solid UI elements incorporating a strong brand identity


Problem Area

With a target market being individuals with an eye for design, this furniture website must be customizable enough to make the end user feel in control of the pieces they pick. The user must be presented with a website offering options that align with their taste. They also need inspiration pages to spark their creativity. 


The Research

The research that was conducted revolved around understanding the end user. The two research methods that were used were user persona and competitive analysis. 


User Persona

A user persona of a hypothetical user named Kathrine was created to understand the end user’s needs and behaviors. 

One of the many competitive websites popular amongst end users is Pinterest. Pinterest provides interior design inspiration for the user. This example can help us implement a similar vision board inspiration concept in the website.    

Competitive analysis


Concepts and Exploration

Sketches

Sketches were developed to explore concepts of the website. 

A user flow was created to help best understand the structure of the website and its navigation.

Site Mapping

Mid-fidelity Prototype

A mid-fidelity prototype was created to further develop the ideas generated in the sketches and site mapping phase. 


Results and Key Takeaways

The result is a beautifully crafted minimalistic high-fidelity furniture website that makes the shopping experience quick and easy. There are plenty of unique furniture pieces, according to the living space. Many touch points throughout the websites indicate the trendiest furniture items on the market. There is also an inspiration mood board section that provides a creative space for the user. 


Key takeaways from this project are the following:

More research needed: Since this project is hypothetical, no clear or strong user problem exists. The project was completed in a short amount of time, which constricted the level of research for said demographic. However, if this project were developed for an actual client, more research would be needed, such as user interviews, secondary research, primary research, user testing, and market analysis.



Competitive analysis is valuable: It is essential to understand the websites the target market uses. Once you know the industry conventions and standards, it will be easier to understand what the user expects and is used to. For example, if the user is used to finding inspiration via mood boards on Pinterest, a similar concept can be explored on Bowen’s Furniture’s website. By merging an inspirational mood board with a more standard furniture website, you can please the end user and make it easier for them to make a confident buying decision.



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