A website overview
I worked at Fusion Cine for three years. I started doing Graphics for email-marketing campaigns using Mailchimp and creating flyers and banners for the website.
After three months, the previous web developer left, and I acquired the responsibility to figure out how to manage and keep a 10,000 products Magento website. Having never worked with e-commerce or touched Magento before, I had to study and find my way around to keep results. There, I've worn many different hats: graphic designer, web designer, developer, administrative assistant, and project manager.
I was asked to design a new version of the website and be responsible for the project management while supervising a contracted development team from the Graphically Speaking agency. I acted as project manager for the website, creating tickets on Trello/Jira, double-checking usability, pointing out issues, and checking if the deliveries were correspondent to the standards that we asked.
The website's goals were to reduce the number of bounces, get clients to stay, browse and convert. The conversion could happen in the form of a sales or rentals quote or an actual purchase.
The client wanted the website to have very complex catalog rules. The prices were to be shown depending on the product, brand, and currency. Some products could only be purchased in CAD. Others only in USD. Some products were never to show prices, others should show price and hide the add to cart button. A miscellany of specificities that turned the project much more dense and challenging.
UX Design
The process of redesigning was detailed. I recorded several sessions of users interacting with the website using Inspeclet and discussed issues with the management team. After that, I drafted the designs and send them for mockup using Invision.
One recurring issue was the website header. It has so many options, colors, icons, and details. Sure it was pretty, but we noticed that people were not browsing because apparently they had too many choices and it took a second or two to load. Also, we were having a sharp drop in the number of people checking the Rentals area of the website. There were reports of people complaining about how the dark gray over black was hard to read. I tried to make the menu way more simpler in this newer version and we noticed users accessing more pages and going deeper into the navigation.
However, the biggest issue is the search area, which I believed that it was linked to the high bouncing rate at the home page. Being a specialized store demands for good search tools. Still, the search bar area was only accessible on the home page. If you wanted to check something, you needed to go back to the home page so you could search. I added at the top bar, so people could easily search all the time.
Another issue was people getting confused if they were on the rentals or sales catalog search. I believe I made that a bit more obvious with a tab button selection and a different color palette.