Chihuly Website Redesign
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I conducted the competitive analysis and comparisons in order to understand the competition facing the Chihuly Garden and Glass Bookstore. The picky gifter persona is likely to visit any of these sites, since they like to search for thorough product descriptions, brand items, and familiar retailers. To justify a site redesign, I prepared the following pitch:
Before working on the interface design, I wanted to conduct a card sort to see if the top navigation and some of the site sections could be better organized. The Chihuly Garden and Glass Bookstore website is a part of the venue’s website, and traffic is directed to the ‘Shop’ page from the main website www.chihulygardenandglass.com. The card sort data below illustrates that most users sorted the website content into an About or Bookstore group.
To keep existing terminology, I would suggest grouping the items categorized as HOME into a VISIT section, so that all general venue and homepage items would be grouped together, while any history or story related items would be grouped into the ABOUT section. I would suggest maintaining the Blog section, as this is consistent with the competitive research. I would also recommend a few changes in the SHOP section. Create a separate Chihuly Glass section would highly illuminate the brand for a picky gifter. Additionally, simplifying the STATIONERY clarifies that the items in that section are not Chihuly art, but are stationery with art printed on it. I would also recommend renaming the KIDS section to GIFTS FOR CHILDREN, since users indicated during the card sort that a title of KIDS was confusing (they thought it indicated activities or tickets related to Kids). Last, adding a VIEW ALL section would help the picky gifter view everything in one place so that they could filter and sort any category. In additional sprints of this project, I would actually split this card sort into two. I would conduct one for shop items and another for the top navigation. I also did not have a large number of participants, so I would want to get more users for additional data and a better view of the potential Information Architecture.