Chihuly Giftshop

An exercise in redesigning the webstore of Seattle’s Chihuly Garden and Glass Museum to better suit a specific audience.

My Role

I was the sole designer for this project, and went through the full iterative cycle. Due to manpower and time constraints, I only went through one round of user testing for my wireframes.

RESOURCES AND TOOLS

Pen, Sharpie, Index Cards, Sticky Notes, Google Slides, Trello, Sketch, inVision

SPRINT LENGTH

2 weeks

Background Information

Project Scope

For this unsolicited website redesign exercise, I looked into redesigning the webstore of the official Chihuly Garden and Glass Bookstore for a particular kind of shopper, the planful buyer.

What is Chihuly Garden and glass bookstore?

The Chihuly Garden and Glass Museum in Seattle has a physical giftshop named the Bookstore. It also offers a giftshop with the same name on it’s website, albeit with only a limited selection of products that are available at the physical location.

Who is the planful buyer?

A theoretical persona to which this exercise is catered around who does not want to leave their home to purchase things, the consummate Amazon shopper that bundles large amounts of items together for free shipping.

The Problem

The current website is ill-suited as a vehicle of e-commerce, let alone the planful buyer who does not want to visit the physical location and wants to purchase things all online. It has a lot of pain points involving things like unintuitive categorizations, small and limited product selection, and confusing branding.

The Solution

The solution is therefore to redesign the Chihuly Garden and Glass website knowing what sort of niche that it occupies and tailoring it more specifically for the kind of planful buyer that is currently ill-served by the current website.

THE PROCESS

Brainstormed about the main pain points to redesign around
Conducted open card sorting to get a strong idea of site layout redesign ideas
Conducted competitive analysis of Chihuly Gift Shop and its closest competitors
Created paper prototypes for usability testing
Created wireframes in Sketch and linked it to inVision
Revised and iterated prototypes based on feedback

USER RESEARCH

After taking a deep look of the current website, a lot of issues regarding informational hierarchy seemed to be pretty prominent. Therefore, open card sorting was conducted with two different individuals who can be considered ‘planful buyers’ in order to get a good idea of what the site layout could look like and if the current site has a good model. I also began comparing features of competitor online shops to get a good idea of where Chihuly Gift Shop lie on that spectrum. This, in addition to a persona feature list, helped solidify what and who I was redesigning the website for.

Card Sorting

I then enlisted the help of two individuals in attempting to figure out where the information architecture of the current website might be lacking. Both of whom I would consider to be ‘planful buyers’ in real life, though I did give them a briefing of what the ‘planful buyer’ persona was. I had them do open card sorting on Trello, to see if the current categorizations even made sense - and found that while the general categorizations made some amount of sense, there were several subitems that generated a lot of confusion over where to place them.

Paper Prototypes

Usability Testing

Revised Sitemap

Final Wireframes

NEXT STEPS

For a continuation of this project, the most important thing is absolutely just iterating more times. I did not get any usability testing done with my Sketch wireframes and did not have the time to finish rigging up that prototype to the extent that I wanted to. I have confidence in the ideas that guided my redesign, but the implementation is untested.

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