Overview
Omnivore is a culinary bookstore based in San Francisco. Due to the pandemic they need to optimize their web experience for customers who aren’t comfortable shopping in-store. They want their website to be a reflection of their in-store experience where they can quickly guide customers to diverse, quality content.
My Role
Product Designer
The Team
Solo project with input from business owner
My Contributions
Redesigned store experience to increase content discovery. Incorporated recommendations and navigation enhancements.
User research
Challenge
How might we make it easier for customers to discover content they like and increase sales?
Omnivore Books’ visitors are overwhelmed by the number of pages they have to scroll through to find books they like and often leave before adding anything to cart.
Approach
Defining Problem & Hypothesis
As a first step, I performed a heuristic evaluation on the existing website. The top issues I discovered were related to browsing efficiency:
To validate my findings, I asked 4 users to find something they would like to buy on the website. The result:
Success Criteria
This would be validated by an increase in product page views, cart adds, and purchases.
Understanding Competition & Leveraging Business Strengths
I performed a competitive analysis to see what features competitors implemented to enhance content discovery:
I also talked to Omnivore bookstore’s owner, Celia Sacks, and identified 3 strengths that give her business a competitive edge, which I felt was important to highlight in the online experience:
Key Design Solutions
Celia’s Recommendations
Since Celia is such an important part of the in-store experience, I created a monthly pick section on the top of the homepage. I also included topic feeds, where she can provide recommendations by subject (ex: African American Cooking, Baking Breads) since this feature is used by almost all of her competitors and asked by her customers in store.
Improved Navigation
About
Vintage & Collectibles
Gifts & Membership
I optimized the global navigation creating broader product groupings and prioritizing by sales. “New Books,” the most sold product group appears before other products. More niche products like vintage books and menus have been grouped together as “Vintage & Collectibles.” I de-prioritized face masks under “Gifts & Membership.” I also added drop-down menus with quick access to topics under each product group. This showcases Omnivore’s unique catalog and makes it easy for customers to navigate to areas of interest. See how my designs evolved with usability testing feedback.
I added book category and subcategory navigation since it was requested from users in the task analysis and already implemented by all of Omnivore’s competitors. I created the categories using an open card sort and aggregating the results with how Celia and competitors categorize books.
Filters
I added filters since it was requested from users in the task analysis and commonly used in e-commerce sites for discovery. I included filtering by Celia’s recommendations and signed books since they are business strengths unique to Celia’s store.
Event Promotion
Since events are an important part of Celia’s business and generate sales, I featured upcoming events on the homepage and created a related events section in the books detail page. This creates a seamless connection between browsing books and discovering related events in-store.
Next Steps & Final Thoughts
I really enjoyed thinking about and designing solutions to help Omnivore’s customers discover their unique content. I think there are many opportunities to iterate on my solutions if I had more time. I would focus on testing and refining the global and book subject navigation since they are critical to user discovery. I would validate my solutions with the site traffic data and see if they move customers further down the purchase path. My favorite part of the project was talking to Celia and learning about her business. She was incredibly gracious with her time and I appreciate the opportunity to re-imagine her online store.
