Assignments
1. Pick Website
I chose SmokoNow.com because it offers a fun, highly visual, and character-driven eCommerce experience that feels very different from generic retail sites.
As a student in UX design, I wanted a site where I could clearly identify brand personality and user intention from just browsing the homepage. It's also a boutique store, which makes it easier to observe and hypothesize about specific user profiles and needs2. Generating Persona's
Notes, observations and persona development document based on examining smokonow.com as my candidate project UX redesign. Project is focused on the shopping cart process and checkout process.
The goal is to identify the user experience and how it can be improved. I have created a document that outlines the personas I have developed based on my observations. The document includes the following personas:
- Persona 1: The Gifter
- Persona 2: The Collector
- Persona 3: The College Student
- Persona 4: The Trendy Teen
- Persona 5: The Mom
3. Persona Research
These user profiles helped me realize that SmokoNows site experience needs to support different user goals; whether thats impulse gifting, product collecting, or dorm personalization. As a designer, this shifted my focus from just the aesthetics to thinking critically about structure, usability, and how to guide various users through the site more intuitively and enjoyably.
4. Vision & Strategy
As part of a user centered redesign project for SmokoNow.com, this document outlines a UX Vision and UX Strategy to guide future design decisions. Written from research and user personas, the UX Vision captures brand experience, while the Strategy provides steps to align user needs with brand objectives. The document prioritizes delight, simplicity and loyalty, aiming to enhance the overall shopping experience for Smokos engaged customer base.
5. Scope & Scenarios
I focused on scenario mapping to understand how real users might interact with the site. By stepping into the shoes of two distinct personas, Grace the Gifter and Casey the Collectable, I documented their journeys from browsing to cart. This helped surface the strengths and friction points of the e-commerce experience. These scenarios provide insight into product discoverability, mobile usability and the effectiveness of the checkout process.
6. Wireframes
These wireframes are a visual extension of the structural and functional improvements outlined in our Information Architecture and Interaction Design for smokonow.com. Designed around the needs of our target persona, Grace the Grifter, the wireframes focus on creating a smoother, more intuitive shopping experience… from discovery to checkout.
Each layout reflects purposeful UX decisions, including the addition of a “Gifts” category to support faster product access, clearer navigation, and a more guided flow through the site.
The wireframes cover the following key screens:
- Home Page
- Main Category Page
- Product Listing Page
- Product Detail Page
- Shopping Cart Pages
- Add to Cart
- View Cart
- Checkout Forms
These collectively demonstrate a user focused approach to improving engagement, clarity and ease of use across the users experience.