Redesigning the Fishs Eddy Experience
About
Fishs Eddy is a fun, one of a kind store, located in New York City. Serving dishware for nearly 30 years, its brand of handmade looking products successfully gives a welcome feel that very few can replicate. Although the store itself is not easy to navigate, its fun interior gives the shopper a sense of adventure. However, this sense of adventure does not translate well to its online presence. With clumsy categories, giving users a very broad idea to what they are looking for, Fishs Eddy is in need of reorganization on their website.
In this brief, I explore how to make Fishs Eddy’s website better by looking at their competitors, potential users and problems facing the brand. With this insight, which I will conduct using card sorting, testing and examination, I will get a better understanding how their website should be organized.
Finally, based on my research, I will create a prototype of their website that better suits the users need and limits their frustration.
Heuristics
The heuristics evaluation helped me identify usability problems on 3 pages of the website. I chose to focus on the Homepage, drink ware page and the checkout page. With this evaluation, I was able judge the usability of the website and think of possible solutions.
Competitive & Comparative Analysis
Fishs Eddy has many competitors. I chose to focus on 2 of them, West Elm and Pfaltzgraff. The reason I focused on West Elm was because it seemed to have the same type of feel in their products, albeit a little more industrialized feel. While speaking with the owner of Fishs Eddy, she mentioned specifically it was one of her competitors, which is weird, due to further research showing that West Elm selling Fish Eddy products.
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I also chose to focus on Pfaltzgraff because they specifically sell dishware, making them a direct competitor. Pfaltzgraph has incredible navigation on their website and more product offerings.
For Comparative analysis, I chose to focus on Etsy. Although there are people on Etsy that sell handmaid dishware, I would not consider them a direct competitor. The reason I chose to focus on Etsy has to do with artists selling their work. Highlighting artists work is very important to Fishs Eddy’s brand and perhaps they can learn ways to sell more art from different local artists.
User Flow
Card Sorting
With open card sorting, the participants had much more freedom in deciding where to put the cards, which made it much more difficult for them. Instead of there being an “Originals” category, all three particpants thought that the cards that didn’t make actually had meaning behind them had more concrete meaning. These lead to a wide variety of new categories. Despite there not being a clear trend, there were a few observations I made:
Out of 3 Open Card Sorters:
3
did not use all of the cards that were given to them
3
put every card having to do with a city into the same category
2
Categorized every card that consisted of a person together
Site Map
When creating the new categories, I wanted to look at the products themselves and not just their names, which were not very descriptive in the first place. During my card sorting, I noticed the trend of combining similar themes from the “Originals” pile together. Although the names made sense with the piles they were creating, the products themselves did not. For example, the collections of Brooklyn and Brooklynese, although sound like they fit together, looked very different from one other. I began looking at each product collection and categorized according to their look, and not their name.
There is still much work to be done in order to get a navigation bar that is truly deserving of the stores website. However, I believe this is a great start with potential to make finding products the customer wants hassle free.
Current Site Map
Redesigned Site Map
User Testing
For my Usability test, I asked the user to buy a mug from the “Cats & Dogs” collection. To do this, the user must perform the following tasks:
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1. Drag and hover mouse over “Collection” category.
2. Wait for menu to drop down.
3. Hover mouse over “Animals” category.
USABILITY FINDINGS:
4/4 users succeeded with finding the “Cats & Dogs” collection
ANALYSIS:
Although most users succeeded, 2/4 users commented that they didn’t know the “Animals” section also dropped down.
RECOMMENDATION:
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Create carrots for all of the drop down menus.
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Do a second round of organizing the categories that are under “Collection.”
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Rename some of the “Collection” categories.
SCORE : Success
QUOTES: “It’s as straightforward as you can get. You probably should not have ‘Cat & Dogs collection’ because I went straight to collection, but I probably would have gone to that anyway.” — Tester 3