The Tools Club

Concept Ecommerce desktop site
Team
Solo
Timeframe
2 week Design Sprint
Tools
Miro, Zoom, Slack, Figma, Trello, Marvel
My Roles
Research, UX | UI Designer

Who are The Tools Club?

The Tools Club is a neighbourhood hardware store with a highly curated inventory. It wants to offer a better website to complement its focus on great customer service.

Client Objectives:

  • To explore ways to minimise bounce rate at checkout.
  • To maintain the brand image it prides itself on: small shop appeal.

What's the Social Good angle?

Research

Before jumping into this process to examine competitors, I wanted to establish a context for the project. I'm aware of my bias with a tendency toward DIY jobs, so it's crucial not to design for myself and the site I’d want to see.

So a picture was starting to emerge that users may appreciate DIY resources in their local area and ready-to-hand to refurnish their homes.

User Interviews

Similarly to acknowledging my own biases, I was careful to interview 3 users who loved DIY and 2 users who had never set foot in a Hardware store.

User's pain points were wonderfully recounted through their frustration associated with the road blocks encountered during the self-directed nature of DIY and their expectations vs the reality of the activity.

This was a rich source of inspiration for the Persona and User Journey below that illustrates his situation.

Persona

Meet Alex - he represents a snapshot of my users and the ways in which I might help them with my solution.

Together with our Research context during Covid, he might want to refurbish parts of the property to make spaces more suitable to Working From Home, or his temporarily remote occupation as an Account Manager could simply afford him more time to get those jobs done.

Problem Statement

Alex is struggling with the manual labour of the jobs he does around the house.

He wants to find ways to get them done quicker and to a higher standard.

Retrospective User Journey

Alex's story is one of starting a job and not being able to finish it as he's not prepared for the scope of the work. I chose to use that wonderful emotion of Frustration with the job in hand as the main catalyst for change for The Tools Club.

"How Might We" (HMW) Questions

The inventory I'd been given was posing a real challenge as there were no fastenings in it, my users' most commonly bought items. No nuts, nails or bolts!

What it did have were a lot of power tools.

So the key here was to frame my HMWs to both solve Alex's frustrations as well as promoting the stock that The Tools Club had to offer:

Paper Prototype

Now if Alex is struggling with his jobs, it makes sense to prioritise the website for simplicity, ease-of-use and pay close attention to convention for features such as the primary navigation.

But as I found in my testing with 5 users, if that very convention is what keeps new users out, it’s a problem.

I learned a valuable lesson here that we can't just put the same aisle headers from a hardware shop onto a primary nav, as users won't click on the button to find out what's 'down the aisle'!

Card Sorting

To gain a few new perspectives to help order the inventory toward accessibility, I held a Card Sort with 10 users on Trello:

With the takeaways from this data I was able to iterate on the primary navigation for the mid fidelity prototype.

Crucially, it was the 4 users unfamiliar with DIY who gave me this insight I needed, rather than the 6 hardware veterans who might've been influenced by experience biases:

Mid-Fidelity Wireframes

Hi-Fidelity Prototype

The main changes here were to streamline the checkout process (a pain point identified in the brief) and to put myself in the shoes of Alex:

If I was in a rush to get the job done, what would I want from a local hardware website?

Final Thoughts

Future Features:

This project taught me the importance of the Persona's narrative, what they want from a solution, and how that can lead you on through the sprint.

I thought there could be a risk this "shop-with-no-nails" might never take off! I discovered it was through exploring ways to make benefit of these constraints that a solution was found.

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