Earwax
ROLE: UX Designer
DURATION: 4 weeks
Earwax Records is cool. You know? That kind of hole-in-the-wall, smushed between a pet store and a specialty food market and somehow smaller than both of them, one guy in the corner playing some really obscure vinyl of Mongolian throat singing, kind of cool. It’s been my local record shop since the early 90’s, and it’s a haven for collectors and music connoisseurs - bins line each side of the store, with very little signage to lead you to genres, which gives one a desire to just browse, see what you can find when you dig around. It’s got a definite feeling that you might come across something truly special.
The Jank
Earwax’s website and online store has a similar feel, but not necessarily to its benefit. If you don’t navigate there with something in mind, you might feel overwhelmed - I certainly did. During initial usability testing, users found that instead of lending a certain mystique, the disorganization instead brought them a feeling of being "not sure where to start," especially unsure of what their end goal was. This wouldn’t do. This wasn’t cool! So I decided to do a bit of digging into why they were feeling this way - and how I could help my favorite local record store have a seamless collection experience online.
Target Audience
I started with a shout into the void: “Do I know anyone who loves music, and wants to talk to me about it?!” Something along those lines. I got three enthusiastic interviewees! All 3 were DJs, perfect!… Except, only one of them had ever bought a record before, and the other two only purchased music digitally. At this point, it’s not feasible to pitch to Earwax, hey, you guys ever heard of Spotify? You ever try doing that, instead? So I changed my parameters, finding 3 more interviewees, who - it turned out - had been collecting records most of their lives. Nailing it.
New Friend
From here, I developed our persona - Bernard “Bernie” Wright - The Lifelong Collector!
To pinpoint if any of Bernie’s needs were supported by feature gaps (and to find where I could add some user-centered improvements!), I ran a comparative and competitive analysis of 4 other companies/apps (either record- or music-centered), and found two features I wanted to focus on to improve Bernie’s experience, and to align with our How Might We statement:
How might we create a navigation experience that enables Bernie to browse, listen to, and document records that interest him efficiently?
Last Looks
With the act of flipping through records and gaining information from the back cover being a huge part of the in-person record shopping experience, and Bernie’s struggle to keep growing his collection (or even remembering which records to grow his collection with!) I wanted these features to work together seamlessly. The goal was to streamline Bernie’s journey from looking at an album’s art, learning more about it and sampling some tracks, adding it to a dedicated wishlist, and eventually checking out with it!
Before getting to the most fun part (Wireframing and Prototyping, obviously!) there was still one small thing to sort out before I could get that pencil onto paper - navigation. With the front page and drop down menus not sparking joy with users, a bit of spring cleaning was in order. I did a card sort with the majority of the navigation options on the front page, and landed on a site map that you could eat off of.
First iteration
From these sketches, I created a clickable prototype for my low-fidelity wireframe and ran some Usability Testing - leading to 100% success hitting the goal screen (that tasty, tasty “Thanks for your order!" screen.)
Usability
The testing results were interesting and led to a few improvements that could be made to the design - there were a couple of ways to complete the tasks laid out for our users, but across the board it seemed like they preferred to do everything from the Album pop-up screen on the front page. This leads me to wonder a few things for Next Steps:
Wanna connect?
Go ahead. I don't bite.