Class: ADV5505 - User Experience Design and Strategy
Lecturer: Michael Tedeschi
Prompt: Over the course of the semester, you will learn about new UX methodologies that you will apply to a project of your choice, culminating in a final project presentation that brings all of your work together in a comprehensive case study. Real-world UX projects are iterative and evolve over time as you learn and experiment, and your project will be a way to experience this process.
Company/Brand: Enailcouture.com
I’m sure at some point I posted about my hobby with nails. I’m certified in nail artistry and gel manicures, and am even considering going back to school again, but this time to become a licensed nail technician. I love nails and always have. This will make sense in a moment—stay with me.
Two semesters ago, I ran into a former classmate of mine in the form of a student-teacher situation. I was the student, he the teacher. We laughed about it—small world. The last day of class as we were saying our goodbyes, I said to him, “Well, Mike. I guess I’ll see you in another ten years,” alluding to the fact the last time we saw one another was ten years prior at our graduation from the University of the Arts and the last time we interacted with one another was in this photo from our senior design show a day or two prior to graduation.
Anyway, he, very appropriately, was teaching our UX Design and Strategy course, as in his career, is in UX. Prior to this, he operated a successful studio in Philadelphia called Interactive Mechanics (archived site) (which he made the difficult decision of shutting down a few years ago) that developed/built beautiful digital experiences for museums and other educational/cultural organizations, alike to other studios like Bluecadet.
Throughout the semester, he educated us on what user experience is and how to function as a UX designer—design, develop, and ideate, among other things. Of course, peppered in, we had a semester-long project where we chose a UX challenge we experienced—it could be with a product or thing we use daily, a place we’ve been to, a website we visit, an app we use, etc.
I chose a website because the first thing that popped into my head was my first experience with Enailcouture.com. A few months prior, I bit the bullet and decided to make a purchase from there. I heard really great things about the products sold, and since I’m always down to try new stuff related to nails, I went ahead and ordered two types of full-cover gel nail tips and the gel “glue” to go with it. As someone who may become a future nail tech, it’s important to stay up to date with trends. The whole purchase process took me ONE HOUR. I wasn’t browsing the site to look at what he had, I went there knowing what I wanted.
The site, upon first glance isn’t offensive. There’s a top nav, some info about shipping (free shipping at $149.99?!), the logo, a hero image, or two… eh.
However, as I began to search for what I wanted, I realized this site was, for starters, not organized well. It’s not user friendly at all, and there is just TOO MUCH going on. So, much, in fact that as soon as I found what I was looking for, I immediately went to check out, paid for my stuff, and closed my laptop because I had a banging headache.
How could an indie site with so many admirers for their products be so inconsiderate in return?
I understand the aesthetic…it’s a Max Estrada thing, but the execution is very amateur, lacks understanding of interface design, and does not provide for a good user experience. What a perfect subject for this project!
There’s also the issue of the pricing! The prices are very affordable—that’s not the issue. The issue is the misleading way the site makes you think you’re getting these products at a steal by “marking” them down. There’s no way a nail kit including a cheap UV lamp most likely made overseas with some accessories and tools costs $500. There’s just not enough in the set to even justify the slashed-to-$200 price tag.
I’m being harsh. Max claims Enailcouture’s products are made in the US….which makes everything even MORE confusing. Being domestically made means the cost would be higher to produce (because it’s cheaper to be made overseas in countries like China and India), and to recoup and have an actual ROI, the charged price would need to be higher. The prices on this site don’t reflect domestic production, unless the product is made here, but the packaging made elsewhere…
But I digress.
This was a perfect subject for this project, not only because I love all things nails, but because the damn site gave me a headache. It was on.
The research was easy. I have tons of gal pals that shop online, so the first part of it was to see what they shop for and to have them navigate through their favorite sites for me. Most of them enjoyed buying clothes, shoes, and cosmetics online. They took me through sites like Sephora, Amazon, Ulta, Sally Beauty, etc. I even got tours of Whole Foods’ and Instacart’s websites.
From there, I recorded pain points and positives. The ladies told me what they loved about these sites and what suggestions they had. To really throw a wrench in the gears, though, I also asked them to navigate through enailcouture.com.
Of ten women, only one of them enjoyed browsing the site and even said she would go back to make a purchase later. The others said things like they felt like their age group does not belong on the site, they weren’t sure what to look at first, and the site was really confusing.
I spent time during the semester organizing these notes on a site called Mural, which is meant to be a collaboration tool for teams. We used it weekly at the start of class as a way for all of us to participate and to start a dialogue. Individually, we used it to organize thoughts and notes.
Here, I had three buckets: positive (pink), negative (blue), and miscellaneous (green). From those three, I sorted them out into five rings: like, dislike, suggestions, feelings, and observations/other. The top set of five on the right side of the screen was for enailcouture.com and the bottom for the other sites my respondents took me through. I found it very interesting how most of the notes I had for enailcouture.com were observations and suggestions.
While I wasn’t surprised with the insight I obtained, I was happy with the meat—this was a lot to work with, and I had some ideas.
Eventually we were introduced to a program called InVision. We could use the online version or the desktop version. I opted for the desktop version, which proved to be a slight mistake later on while building my prototype. Who would have thought the web version allowed the ability to create pseudo drop down menus but the desktop version would not? Anyway…
Building the prototype was cake for me once I understood how the program worked. In fact, I got a little carried away and like…
PROTOTYPED THE WHOLE WEBSITE. Like almost everything I added had some sort of basic functionality.
And I built out every page. (I removed some for the final, lol)
Mike said he was impressed, but I may want to dial it back a tad and only have functionality where I want to get my point across.
Fair enough.
The point I wanted to get across was the site didn’t need as much “decoration” as it has. The links in the drop down menus in the top nav could be condensed. The descriptions for the items could be extremely descriptive in much fewer words, the organization for varieties of items could be better, and the images could be shot better instead of on the assistant’s desk in the ENC office near piles of other products and papers.
My final prototype was presented to a select few of my original respondents. I asked them to perform certain actions and talk their way through it. Most had an easier time navigating and all had feedback that sounded better than what I originally collected for the real website.
This project, if it were a real-world project, is far from done. There would be multiple rounds on interviews and testing and updates and revisions. I wanted to find a way to get the attention of Max to tell him, my guy…your website needs help. But it hasn’t worked out so far. One day.
If you want to check out my prototype, you can do so here. I’m not sure how much longer it will be accessible since it’s tied to a license Temple University owns, but for now it’s there and able to be accessed. There also may be some bugs with a few things as you navigate, like the logo—you’ll know it when you see it. I don’t know how to fix it, so I’m not. It doesn’t break the functionality, just looks weird. I also removed SOME of the functionality (okay, so I did dial it back a little) where I felt like it wasn’t needed.
InVision is a tool I see myself using again at some point in the future, so I want to stay connected with it. I have some side research to do on pricing and options so I can stay with it. If using the web version is free, I may do that until I find I have a reason to pay. •