Arts and Crafts Group
Website, Persona, and Test Overview
Our group chose to user test and redesign the website Sarah Maker, which is focused on teaching people how to create many different arts and crafts. The persona we chose for our user test was a young woman who wanted to learn to crochet, so for our first iteration of our website redesign, we focused on making the home page easier to use for both beginner crocheters and for any user of the website.
Original Homepage
Homepage Redesign
The first of the main changes to the homepage came in the form of adding drop down menus to each of the menu bar options at the top of the page. On the existing site, these are single-click options (except for the “Crafts” menu). This change will allow users to find more specific topics within the broader topic that they are exploring, as well as make overall site navigation much more simple and easy to use, and cause the users less frustration when they are looking for something specific.
Redesigned Homepage
Additionally, in the menu bar, a “Home” button has been added and the “Crafts” button has been replaced with a “More” button. While more savvy users may know that a majority of websites allow you to navigate back to the home menu of a page by clicking on the site’s logo or title at the top of the page, those who are not aware may have difficulties navigating easily back to the homepage. The addition of the “Home” button will easily remedy this issue. The adding of the “More” button serves to clear up a bit of confusion that may be caused by the “Crafts” button. The “Crafts” button comes off as relatively redundant, given that each of the other tabs actually contain crafts as well. By changing this button to “More,” some of this confusion may be eliminated. Finally, short descriptions have been added to each of the different craft options further down the home page. This will provide users with some more information about each of their given options without them having to go back and forth between the different links.
Right under the redesigned menu options, there is a new tagline and brief introduction to the site – on the original design, you have to scroll all the way down to the bottom of the page to find the “About” section or click on another menu (such as “Crochet” and then click on her information from the side). The new design immediately tells users what the purpose of the site is, rather than just having a bunch of miscellaneous menus.
At the bottom of the page, in addition to the existing “Navigation” section, we have changed the Social Media links to their respective icons and added “Crafts” and “Resources” section, mirroring what users can find at the top of the page so they don’t have to scroll all the way back up after exploring the home page. In the “Resources” section, we have also added an FAQ as a catch-all for users looking to find basic information about the site as well as about specific crafts. This will increase the ways that users can find the information they need depending on their preferred way of moving around the website.
We will be submitting an additional post to this one soon with a new wireframe depicting modifications made to the crochet page.