Through our research, we discovered Madewell’s existing website could use some improvements in many areas of their website. Madewell had on a targeted audience they wanted to see how well they would be able to navigate through their website and if it it was of value to their customers. The new task was to see if we could recreate Madewell’s website to be easier and more gender neutral for this new audience of theirs. We performed Business Analysis and viewed Competitors and Comparators websites with Madewell’s to see where they were lacking up to date in their Heuristics. We also performed user research with Closed and Open card sorting to see where users were navigating to while searching on Madewell’s website. Also where users would look when searching for specific items throughout the website.
We had some key insights and takeaways from these tasks and was able to create a new proposed navigation for Madewell’s website. We put the existing sight map and our proposed sight map to the same task test and found about the same results in terms of navigation. Although for our new proposed navigation, it fell in line and was more appealing to Madewells target audience. Women and Men were removed and renamed Shop for You and Body Type, which was able to clearly show Madewell did not abide by gender norms and were open to all genders, pronouns and body types. Users were more drawn to Madewell’s website and felt equality throughout the enitre experience. We will continue to do more testing with Madewell’s site to make it easier for users to navigate.
For this project, our team was tasked with researching an alternative navigation and information architecture for our client, Madewell. Based on initial research, our client believed there was a key customer base being underrepresented in their shopping experience called the Fashion Devotee.
With this information, we set out to better understand our client’s values, customers, and latest business strategies by first conducting contextual inquiries via store visits, creating a business canvas model, and a competitive/comparative matrix. Then, we conducted navigation studies using tree testing and open/closed card sorting to understand how our users relate to the website’s taxonomy. Finally, we used the Abby Method to evaluate the site’s heuristics, rating each one on a scale from 0-3.
Store visits proved useful to understand that our client’s customers are indeed denim-focused. Several customers, male and female, were trying on jeans and asking sales associates questions pertaining to color, size, and fit. Contrary to the visit being a weekday, most customers were coming in to browse and try on several items at a time. From the exterior, we observed several customers, in the age range of 30-50, walk into the store to browse and exit the store a few minutes later. The competitive matrix revealed that Madewell is a value driven brand but still maintains trendy clothing choices, helping it stand out among its competitors.
We looked to direct and indirect competitors to analyze where our client’s features are meeting expectations and where they are falling short.. Then, we conducted a navigation tree study, open and closed card sorting based on the existing Madewell website to understand if the users were the relationships between all categories
Our client, Madewell provided us with an archetype: a group of people that share similar traits and habits that are shopping from them. They noticed that their website is not optimized for this particular group, so they hired us to take a look at their existing website and suggest changes.