Content Strategy & Design
VINYL Beauty Bar
Website Redesign
This case study highlights my work in Content Strategy and Design. The full case study can be found at:
What is VINYL Beauty Bar?
VINYL was voted Best Salon in Austin in its first year of existence. They also had a strong community presence as a record shop and location for live music. While they were very successful in real life, they had a minimal and unorganized website, with no presence of their music model.
This project focuses on the content design I used to redesign the VINYL Beauty Bar website.
Goals
-
Reimagine the VINYL Beauty Bar website into a platform that brings in revenue and streamed music events.
-
Use a cohesive strategy to create meaningful, engaging, and sustainable content that drives online sales, appointments, and events.
DEFINE
APPLY a content audit. Understand the goals and needs of VINYL Beauty Bar and establish platforms and hierarchies online to increase business.
DESIGN & TEST
CREATE new pages based in logical and intuitive user flows. EMPLOY User Testing to establish the usability of the website.
ITERATE
EXAMINE results of User Testing and Iterate.
How to measure success
After speaking with the stakeholders, it became clear there were three ways to measure VINYL's success with this design:
-
VINYL wanted to double their online sales.
-
Establish a functioning online calendar of events that brought in consistent activity.
-
Create a place to livestream events and see a funnel of patrons using the platform in order to strengthen their market and brand.
Content Audit/Information Architecture
The original homepage had no clear information architecture. My first action was to do a content audit.
My content audit found multiple pages for the same action, circular paths, and a massive carousel of photos that went nowhere.
VINYL's aesthetic and tone is very classy rock n' roll, and serves a vegan clientele. They are a record store and community hub for their popular music and vegan events, as well as a salon.
I identified that these were three different identities who value VINYL for different reasons.
In order to understand how each of these personas would use the site, I made User Flows/Task Analyses.
Task Analysis/User Flow
Appointment for Hair or Nails
Buy a Record
Check out Band
Branding & Marketing
VINYL had won "Best of Austin" the prior year, had a huge positive YELP following, many relationships with local businesses in Austin (throwing fundraisers and events together), as well as being a strong part of the vegan community. None of these major branding points were present on their website.
These flows and my information architecture became this new navigation.
I put their record store right in the header.
They have a huge positive Yelp following. I put it here.
A major part of their brand is being vegan.
I put their "Best of Austin" win up front.
Events
Call to Action for a major revenue source.
I established a portion of the site for their music events, named it, and wrote all copy.
I made this logo for DJ Stachio
I listed the community relationships VINYL had and wrote all copy.
I created an online record store with an Instagram stream the VINYL DJ would curate. I wrote all copy. Added a "Call to Action" for this revenue source.
I created the slogan, and branded this header.
Call to Action.
6 pictures on the carousel, all with a purpose, all link somewhere.
SEO & Taxonomy
I did VINYL's SEO, which has them on the first page of a search for "VINYL Austin." The major search words are:
-
VINYL Austin
-
Vegan Salon
-
Record store Austin
-
Music Venue Austin
Results
VINYL now streams their events and has dramatically expanded their lifestyle and culture reach. They regularly host online shows that raise money for local causes, including health insurance for musicians through Health Alliance for Austin Musicians (H.A.M.M.)
VINYL went from having no online presence to having it become an important part of their income. Online purchases are now 22% of of the boutique's income.
Prosodio
Educational Software
This case study highlights my work in Content Strategy and Design. The full case study can be found at:
What is Prosodio?
Prosodio is an educational software company that's developed a Voice to Text technology, called "Pointer," which enables parents to read aloud to their children while a visual interface follows. We had been given an idea and a mock up video of how the Founder thought his idea might work.
My team designed this product from the ground up, and much of my focus was Information Architecture, Content Design, and UX Writing.
Goals
-
Build the design with the parent as User.
-
Strong onboarding to quickly and intuitively explain the major User Paths
-
Collect data from the children's usage that would help the parents track and practice challenging material with the child.
-
Major goals = clear onboarding and strong analytics.
DEFINE
INTERVIEW Subject Matter Experts (SME's.) to clearly map out the best practices for children's literacy learning. RESEARCH existing digital reading platforms. AFFINITY MAP our results.
DESIGN & TEST
ESTABLISH personas and establish USER FLOWS. SKETCH wireframes. USABILITY testing to refine the goals and effectiveness of our design paths.
REITERATE
EXAMINE results of User Testing and REITERATE. Begin the process from the perspective of other users (the child and the teacher.)
How to measure success
In order to measure the success of our Onboarding and Analytics, usability tests and reiteration are necessary. Can a parent go through the onboarding and begin using the software? Can they look at the reading session their child did after the fact, and point at paragraphs they should go over with their child?
Content Audit/Information Architecture
In order to begin the process of understanding how the design would work, I made a map of the needs and early user flow.
Comparative Analysis & Heuristic Evaluation
I compared other Digital Reading Education apps and sites. Who does reading education well and why?
We found that many of them used strong, traditional forms of research based instruction that used images and words, more in the didactic instructional tradition.
Our SME interviews stressed the idea that words are a type of image, and that an important part of child reading is practicing the recognition of these word images visually and connecting them to spoken language. Their connection to story needs to be personal and more than just memorizing words.
Personas
I conducted a portion of the User Interviews and used that information to create the Personas for our design.
One of the important aspects of our design was communicating the analytics between parents and teachers. This meant we had two Personas.
Content Mapping & Strategy
With the data and research from the SME interviews, the team made an affinity map to map the content we would be building.
The affinity map allowed up to see patterns emerge:
-
Our SME's made it clear that words are connected to images and sounds. A fully robust reading software would connect these three.
-
The experience of the parent is linked to the child's.
-
Children want to tell stories, and this encourages them to connect to the written word.
-
There must be clear and robust metrics for the adult.
Our data and research resulted in a Content Model that is summarized in this chart.
Onboarding /Voice/ Tone/Branding
Clear and engaging onboarding was an important aspect to bring parents onto the platform. I did the copywriting for the screens and established the tone we'd agreed on in strategy sessions.
Parent Analytics
How can we help busy parents, some of whom may not have enjoyed traditional reading lessons themselves, clearly and quickly see where their children need help?
We highlight problematic words and also show how many times it was attempted.
I also created the storyboard, which I then envisioned as a video. It communicated and explored the purpose of our design, and was also used to imagine the direction the next iterations could go. I believe we should always continue to have conversations and visuals that help us understand the scope of our design. In addition, it helped us get clarity and prompted discussions when we needed redirection.
Results
We began working for Prosodio as our Capstone project at General Assembly, but our design was so well received by the Founder of the company that our team is happy to report that we have been brought on board to Prosodio as partners to continue this design to completion.
Next steps: Our prototype has been requested for usability testing with the Temple, TX School District.