Case Study 1: Redesigning the Toy Store e-Commerce Website
About the Project
Boomerang Toys is a local family-owned toy store located in Tribeca in New York City. They are specialized in high-end and educational toys for children aged 5 upward. They have a website, https://www.boomerangtoys.com/. However, as you can see in their sample pages below, their website is not an e-commerce site. You cannot purchase anything through their site. The only thing you can do is view some items and call them or visit their store in person. So, I decided to create a case study which could be a first step toward a proposal for enhancing the site.
Research Process
I conducted user interviews with store customers by visiting the store on-site, and created an affinity mapping to see what users feel and want from the store.
I researched other toy stores in the New York City area by visiting their websites, and did the competitive analysis.
As you can see in this chart, Boomerang Toys website has only two features—view items on the website by toy categories and free delivery service option, while the other three competitors’ e-commerce sites have about 15 to nearly 20 features for doing online shopping.
Insights
Boomerang Toys should benefit by creating a more informative and functional website to meet with their homepage header, “NYC’s Best Toy Store,” because there are a lot of competitors in the city which have a better web presence. The Boomerang Toys store should have a unique but friendly website so that they could attract the neighborhood customers as a community rooted store in lower Manhattan as well as to attract general shopping audience.
Another problem I found was their toy categories. They have 15 categories, and they look very unorganized. Plus, having too many categories tends to create too many buttons or too many hierarchies which makes the website very complicated, hard to navigate, and confuses users.
So, I conducted “Card Sorting” with 8 participants trying to find a way to simplify toy categories. As you can see in the dendrograms, there is not much agreement among the participants about toy categories. After studying it carefully, though, I managed to come up with
8 product categories and 7 global site navigations:
By Age
By Toy Categories
New Arrivals
Best Sellers
Deals
About Us
Contact Us
And with those, the only first two navigations, By Age and By Toy Categories, have a subset of categories.
Design Process
Rough pencil sketches to brainstorm, converted to grayscale low-fidelity wireframes, then I created the proposed navigation and organizational scheme, in other words, “Sitemap.”
Based on my research and insights, I created two personas (primary and secondary personas), as you can see below.
And here’s one happy path user flow.
I believe I added eCommerce functionality to the site that the current website lacks. Some sample improvements I made are: I created the global buttons on the top so that site visitors can easily get around the site, including “New Arrivals,” “Best Sellers,” and “Deals” that give customers various choices. The detailed product page has product information with PRICE as well as related product information that will be helpful for shoppers and also should encourage customers to stick around a bit longer at their site. Aesthetically it’s clean and simple but still following their current branding image.
This is the high-fidelity prototype.
