INTRODUCTION
Crafting a better Michaels app.
Founded in 1973, Michaels is America's largest provider of Arts and Crafts with over 1,200 stores in the United States. They retail arts and crafts and merchandise for do-it-yourself home decorators.
The challenge: make the Michaels app appeal to more crafters.
DETAILS
Where’s the creativity?
Michael’s slogan is “Where creativity happens”, this sentiment is largely missing from the existing Michaels app and the App design looks dated.
Over the course of a two-week sprint covering the full UX journey, we developed the following solutions:
Recreate the Michaels app to maintain its visual identity while making it more contemporary and add more features.
Add a primary and secondary user flow that was largely missing from the existing app.
Flow 1: DIY Projects, users can discover and choose from user-uploaded projects, this user flow also serves as a one-stop spot for buying what you need for the project and getting inspired.
Flow 2: Benefits, focused on improving the Benefits experience within the app.
3 PERSON TEAM
Zoom meetings from CA, TX & WA.
I was a part of a three-person team on this project. We collaborated via zoom and slack almost every day. As a group, we worked together on the discovery process and individually worked on areas that fit our strengths.
My responsibilities were focused on but not limited to:
Contributing original concepts and features for the app.
UI Design from wireframe to mockup.
Developing a visual language - maintaining and implementing a design system.
Contributing to the usability tests and the user persona.
Research: Michaels app reviews on the Apple App Store.
OUR PROCESS
Crafters want a place to be inspired.
We started by doing personal research of our own experience with the app and website as well as looking at reviews of the Michaels app. The reviews we found were very insightful about missing features on the app and what people wanted to see. We decided this information belonged on our affinity map alongside the user interviews highlights.
For our user interviews, we sought out people who were involved in the crafting space. Fortunately for us, one of our users had worked at Michaels for many years, this interview provided lots of insightful information about how the app fulfills business needs. For example, I learned that many who have the App use the coupon function at checkout.
Next, we began affinity mapping our findings, we synthesized this information into the following questions:
Crafters need more thoughtful guidance, incentive, and inspiration so that they’re better equipped to make their creative dreams a reality.
How might we make coupons and rewards more useful for users?
How might we help users get inspired?
How might we become a one-stop creativity shop?
With an established challenge and understanding of what we wanted to focus on, we began competitive and comparative analysis.
We researched companies who offered certain features exceptionally well.
Comparative Analysis
To kickstart these ideas into life, we began the Design Studio Method.
We came away from this rapid ideation with lots of ideas for features.
We connected the dots and decided to design a flow for DIY projects and revamping Benefits.
We were happy with the success of this session because we established common goals and roughly knew how they would come to life.
Design System
We all wanted to go our separate ways and wireframe our tasks. It was my responsibility to develop a design system, this way we could work independently and re-convene with app screens that reflect a cohesive design language.
ITERATION & TESTING
A creative one-stop shop.
For wireframing, we focused on two user flows. DIY was our primary flow and Benefits was our secondary flow. Prior to testing these flows in the prototype, we worked on many iterations of the DIY project page.
V1
It begins with the idea to offer checkout for all the items listed on the D.I.Y. project page.
V2
1. Changed the buttons from up and down to plus and minus.
2. Made language more clear.
V3
3. Added pricing to items.
4. Added an expand icon.
Usability test 1
We conducted 6 usability tests, our actionable steps from these sessions were:
Make pictures bigger.
Add prices to the products within the project page.
Add back buttons throughout the app.
We were all surprised that we had made the mistake of not including prices before the first prototype session. This turned out to be an obvious lesson, Usability Tests can bring forth important features that were simply overlooked.
Usability test 2 key insights:
The sort and filter menu was generic and needed to be tailored to the page.
A user found the on-boarding logo position unpleasant (he was a Graphic Designer, good feedback I reckon!)
50% of users felt the Add All to Cart was too small and needed to be a bigger Call to Action.
One user mentioned that when they add all items to the cart from the project page, they don’t want a pop-up, but rather the number of items reflected on the cart symbol on the top of the screen. I would like to do further A/B testing on this because I feel some users may prefer the pop-up because it gives them the option to checkout
Screen: (L) How to earn rewards (R) Users rewards home page
Screen : (L) DIY Headband project list (R) Funky Floral Headband project page
NEXT STEPS
Motivation to upload projects.
We created high-fidelity wireframes for the entire flow for how a user would find DIY projects and use the app to craft their project, follow instructions, watch tutorials, look at reviews, etc. With more time, we would like to design a user flow for how a user would upload DIY projects to the DIY page.
We hypothesize that giving users Michael’s benefits points and badges alongside their username for popular projects will motivate users to upload with attention to detail.
WHAT I LEARNED
Crafting is a passion project.
I learned how important it is to agree on a design system from the beginning.
I rediscovered the importance of delegation and project management while working on a team.