September 2020 - December 2020
Shopify, Figma
UX/UI Designer
Overview
The impact of the pandemic on businesses made a lot of owners struggle and adapt. Many local businesses still relied on in person interactions to make sales. The purpose of Digital Main Street's Future Proof program was to aid these businesses and help them create or improve their online presence.
The team I worked with consisted of a graphic designer, marketer, and copywriter in addition to my role as a UX/UI designer. I had the opportunity to help improve websites by making changes to the information architecture and adding/changing interactions such as buttons and plugins. These improvements were made by taking a look at the store's analytics and seeing where customers seem to be getting lost at. At the same time, I researched competitors in the same industry to get an idea of what else they can do separate themselves.
My accomplishments:
Taught clients how to make design changes in their CMS
Increase in conversions
60%
40%
Increase in sales
Learnings & challenges
This was my first time working with others outside of school projects which pushed me to improve my communication skills. Through the daily meetings with my team members and the weekly updates with the clients, I had learned to communicate ideas consistently and ask for feedback when needed.
The challenges I had to overcome as a designer allowed me to expand my skill set, especially in ecommerce site building. Learning how to add plugins was simple enough but sometimes code was needed to customize it or get it working properly, so I had to learn a bit of coding to fully implement them. Another challenge I had to overcome was knowing how to defend my design ideas to the clients. Given that my team's purpose was to provide our expertise towards their online presence, there were times when I didn't know how to explain my thoughts to them without making it sound like they are completely wrong. This showed me that research can help in these types of situations as well. After presenting my findings, I successfully convinced them that my design choices were supported by the data.
Overall, clients saw improvements of up to 40% increases in sales and about a 60% increase in newsletter signups, add to carts, and other conversions. New and returning customers were interacting with the website more which led to multiple successful outcomes.
