Aurora Studio Site Redesign

After these findings, we conducted a competitive & comparative analysis to better understand the business space. From this analysis, it was clear that while Aurora Studio's website may be more limited compared to some bigger companies in terms of products and features, it makes up for it in its unique curation. By having a more limited number of artists, and with many of these artists being Persian and Iranian, Aurora Studio can offer a more curated and personalized experience for users.

2 USABILITY TESTS WITH 8 USERS

Users were tasked with finding specific products to test out how intuitive the navigation and menu/filter categories were. It took users longer than expected to complete both tasks, and with several errors. Most of the errors and extra time were due to confusion over menu and filter categories.

9 INTERVIEWS

11 OPEN CARD SORTS

A majority of users used words such as "abstract," "minimalism" and "pop art," as well as descriptors like "funny," "Zen," or "space."

In addition to card sorts, a "MSCW" chart and laying out of website's architecture helped define the project's scope and direction.

4 TASKS, 4 USERS

Since the first task of finding a t-shirt took users slightly longer than anticipated, we made the text sizes for "product" and other categories larger to make them easier to see. To read reviews, most of the errors were simply that users clicked on the stars or amount of reviews, instead of clicking the "reviews" option below. This indicated to us that we should make those clickable options as well.

Finding a hoodie with an abstract design on it was more challenging for users because our headers were not clear. All users were confused about the terminology of "theme," so in our next fidelity we updated the wording.

In addition to making updates based on our first round of usability tests, we began to add some more text and detail to the next version of our prototypes, our mid-fidelity prototypes. We also cleaned up some of the margins, spacing, and overall formatting, to make it look a bit more polished.

5 TASKS, 4 USERS

We repeated two of the same tasks, to test if we had improved upon them both in terms of efficiency and in terms of error management. We also added a few more tasks, to continue to test how intuitive the navigation and wording was, and how findable certain key information on the website was. Again, our user research showed us that these features were important to help users feel confident in their purchases.

‍Overall, we saw more success than in our previous tests, but still had areas of improvement that are highlighted below.

When users tried to find a hoodie with an abstract design on it, half of the users tried to use the artwork showcased on the home page first, instead of clicking into "shop." One user also failed to use the filters right away. We solved for this by embedding the artwork more on the page through clarifying text and better contrast to highlight where users could go, and made the icons clickable to navigate into the shop.

To figure out how Aurora Studio supports artists, all users clicked on "our journey" first. However, 1 user was not satisfied with the results on that page, and continued navigating around the website. Furthermore, another user expressed initial confusion at the term "price transparency" so as we moved into our most detailed mockup, we needed to make adjustments. We decided to update the terminology to "how pricing works" for our final round of usability tests.

4 TASKS, 4 USERS

Again, we repeated two tasks, finding a hoodie with an abstract design on it, and finding how Aurora Studio supports artists, because users did not successfully complete those tasks in previous tests. We also wanted to test other flows, such as finding a design on other products, and searching for an artist.

Overall, we decreased the amount of time needed for each task and therefore increased efficiency. By solving for pain points in previous design iterations, we were able to have more successful tasks in the final rounds of testing. We were also able to create more interaction and potential pathways for users to take, which decreased the amount of errors.

For information on supporting artists, it was clear that we needed to make that information more visible through increased text sizing. We also added a new section about how pricing works under "Our Journey" page, to make it more discoverable. But, this task should be further tested.

Final Designs