Let's create a plushie shop!

Plushie time!

Introduction

As a plushie lover, I've spent a lot of time browsing through different shopping sites. I noticed that many of the existing sites have usability issues, such as limited language availability or visual clutter. It is particularly hard for plushie lovers here to find reliable websites for buying plushies produced in other countries, like Japan or Korea. With this application, I hope to create a platform for plushie lovers like me to shop for their favorite characters.

Usability Issues

Here is an analysis of the usability issues found in two sample shopping sites.

Store 2

The images for the products are too small, which make them a bit hard to see. This is an important usability issue, since images are an important aspect of plushies. The titles also have similar font size as the body, which makes it hard to distinguish between visual elements.

You cannot filter by availability on this site. This is an important functionality since users often would want to view only available products and filter out the unavailable ones to improve shopping efficiency.

There are too many filters stacked together on the left of the website. These filters could be better separated into different categories. Furthermore, there are three separate navigation bars at the top, which can be quite confusing, especially for new users navigating the site. Instead, they can be consolidated into a single navigation bar for clarity and better learnability.
Store 2

Some of the visual elements have low contrast between the text and the background. For example, some of the buttons have white text against light blue background, which make them hard to read.

Similar to the first website, this website has multiple navigation bars, both on the side and at the top. These nav bars have a lot of repeated information, which decreases learnability for new users and efficiency for returning users.

Design Choices

Click on the images to view them in more detail!

Final Product

Here is the final product! Click on the image to visit the Floofy Plushies shop

Iterative Design Project Page

Conclusion

Throughout the process of building this application, I learned a lot of valuable lessons regarding how to create a shopping site that usable and accessible. As a lover of plushies, I’ve been on many shopping sites. Revisiting these sites for this project with the mindset of a designer made me notice many usability and accessibility issues that I never noticed before. For example, I never realized that some of these sites are actually quite hard to navigate and lack certain functionalities like filtering by availability.

This process has shown me that when you observe everything through the lens of a UX designer, you can make observations that may have never crossed your mind before. These observations helped me make design choices in my own application that attempt to resolve the usability issues in existing sites.

I'm still only a beginner in UX design, and I have a lot more to learn. I look forward to learning more about design principles and using them to create meaningful and accessible applications!

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