Overview

Furniture Buy Consignment was established in 1996 in Lewisville, Texas. They strived to provide customer the most convenient way to sell and the smartest way to buy furniture. Furniture Buy Consignment sells over 3000 quality consignments each month between their 6 locations. The furniture consignment market gets more competitive in past few years and Furniture Buy Consignment feels there’s a need to continue expand their business and exposed more to online sellers and buyers.

I was the sole designer for this student project.

Project Goals

• Design a responsive website that is easy to use and accessible from different devices

• Create a brand logo to deliver the brand message well

Research

Research Goals- I want to identify our target users, industry trend, user pain points and needs for furniture consignment.

I started with market research and below are some key findings:

• 49% of Millennials and Generation Z say that they prefer to shop in the resale sector instead of trying to find something that is new. 

• As of 2018, 77 percent of millennial respondents stated that they had redecorated their homes in the past two years

• Sustainability is big on the list of things Millennials are looking for from the products they buy and the brands they support

By conducting a competitive analysis with both local and national furniture consignment stores, I learned some common issues are:

• Limited product information online

• Customer can only browse product information but cannot purchase it online directly

• Consignment process is not clear enough

• Poor quality images make the product less attractive

I prepared some screener questions before recruiting participants for the user interview. I want to make sure participants are familiar with furniture resale. Basing on the market research, I interviewed a group of participants age from 20-40. Below is a summary of my interview findings.

Problem Statement

How might we help customers to get the products they like in an easily and cost effectively way?

Ideation

I created a list of features basing on the issues uncovered from user interviews.

I created a task flow to show all the pages and actions users need to take to finish their tasks.

I identified some of the key pages from my task flow and sketched them out.

Responsive Web Design

• I build the layout of this website with a flexible grid, capable of dynamically resizing to any width. And then I started with designing a mobile version first and then adapting the layout that it can be viewed neatly on tablet and desktop devices without too many modifications.

• I replaced top navigation bar on desktop devices with hamburger menu in the upper left corner on tablet and mobile app because of the limited space we have on these two devices.

I created a logo and some other UI elements that can well represent our brand attributes- Antique, Sustainable, Elegant.

How it works

Easy to Understand Categories

Easy navigation is one of the key challenges — users want to find their items quickly. Categories will be easily accessible from the navigation bar as well as top section on home page-“Shop by Department”.

Helpful Filters

• In my user research, some users mentioned they would like to see and feel the product before they purchase, therefore store location filter is placed in the first place to help user to shop with nearby store.

• Price range is usually one of the most important factors for the customers. I added a price filter after store location filter.

Easy-to-Scan Product Pages

There are few elements I have included here to support good product pages：

• A set of high-quality photos of the product from different angles

• Overview of the product

• Visible product price VS original retail price

• Eye-catching call-to-action button

Distraction-Free Checkout

The checkout process can make or break the conversion rate. My focus was to allow users get through the final steps of the sales process as frictionless as possible.

Iteration

Pain point #1: Users feel uncertain about they got related information to confirm their payment.

I have added “order number” and “confirmation email” information on payment completion page to ensure user got all the information they need to confirm their payment.

Pain point #2: Users need to take extra step to find store open hours after finish purchasing.

Once users finish purchasing for store pickup, they wanted to check store open hours before going. They needed click store locations on navigation bar to find that information.

I added an information icon on product detail page where user can hover over the info icon to find store open hours easily.

Next Steps

This was my first project after learning the basics of design. I’m pleased with my focus on accessibility for this product. If I had more time to work on the project I would:

• Do another round of usability test with users

• Work on more screens with features to provide a better user experience.