Ewu Bookstore - UX & UI

THE PROJECT
To improve the website of Eastern Washington University's bookstore both from a UX and UI perspective.

THE PROBLEM
The bookstore's website was not user friendly or responsive, and the site navigation from product pages to checkout was confusing to our users. These factors often resulted in cart abandonment partway through the process and low online sales. The bookstore also had a high bounce rate.

THE RESEARCH
I did reasearch to figure out what factors may be leading the site to have high bounce rate, cart abandonment, and low time on pages. Students and alumni were also interviewed to see what were the primary needs of our users.

Major Research Findings

Mobile phones are used for more than 1/4th of online sales.

Having more than 5-6 items on the main navigation leads to customer frustration.

Textbooks are the most commonly searched for item.

THE PROCESS
Once we knew we needed to reduce the number of options presented to the user on our homepage, I worked with the information architecture for sometime and decided to reduce the number of options on our home navigation to just five. All other options are accessible via dropdown menus.

After figuring out the site structure, I moved into the user flow of our checkout experience. I focused my attention on ensuring that the user would not get confused or have too many unwanted steps. It was also important that the user had a sense of where they were in the checkout process.

THE SOLUTION
I created a mobile-friendly site. I developed a step by step check-out process that allows our users to see where they are in the in the checkout process. This allowed for a seemless checkout. I also presented the user with an order summary at the very end of the process in case they had made any errors. Once completing everything else, I moved into wireframing, UI, and prototyping of the website for both desktop and mobile.

(Deliverables were created for wires, flows, sitemap, and designs) This project has been passed on and is currently under development.