In this project my group and I were tasked with creating a more efficient interface than the current state of the website totalwine.com. We began by conducting a User Needs Analysis on the current site to get a benchmark and user’s thoughts on the site. After conducting the UNA (User Needs Analysis) we created a new interface that is more user friendly than the existing site. Once the new interface was completed, we conducted a final UNA on our created interface to see if we could create an improved interface.
To begin the UNA my team and I took a total of nine users and asked them to find a specific wine on the page, on average users were able to find the wine in 5 minutes and 50 seconds. After my team and I conducted our initial UNA on totalwine.com we took the information given to us by the users to build a site that is more searchable and user friendly. Our final solution was created around the idea of making the searchability of the website. We set a benchmark time of only 3 minutes to find the wine on our new site. We did not make any high fidelity prototypes, only low fidelity and our results were that on average users were able to find the product 20 seconds slower than our benchmark time. However; after accounting that users were viewing on low fidelity which they had likely never seen we had high hope that on a high fidelity fully functioning website the users would have been able to find the desired wine in under the benchmark time.
About half way through our process we discovered that we were designing the website to be visually appealing and not functional, after realizing that we began rebuilding the website for a second time this time with a larger focus on making the website more searchable and focusing less on the visuals.
The amount I learned from this project is absolutely incredible, it was the first project I had ever completed a UNA for. There was an incredible amount that I learned but there was also so much that I wish I would have done differently. When I did my first UNA I wish I would have kept better track of the time and given better instructions to my user. I also felt as though I interacted with the user too much. Before completing my first UNA however I did decide to pull my phone out and record their audio and I am so glad I did that, it allowed me to go back and listen to the exact thoughts and process the user went through. The only thing I would have changed there is asked them to voice what they are doing as they are doing it and their exact thought process at the time.