Re-Designing the Local Marketplace Experience
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The UX design process of bringing a historic marketplace into the digital world.
Shopping local has numerous benefits including improving your local economy, supporting your community, and reducing your environmental footprint. Unfortunately, local businesses are facing significant challenges to surviving in today’s competitive retail environment. With the proliferation of e-commerce, they are predicted to lose $1.6 billion in sales to large online retailers. According to Vanity reports, independent businesses in Canada have a particularly poor online presence. Canada is therefore a prime target for foreign e-commerce retailers today, unless businesses can learn to adapt to changing consumer behaviour.
Since online shopping spending has increased 50% between 2014 and 2019 in Canada, local businesses have the opportunity to benefit from this change by creating an online presence. By going digital, retailers can increase interest in shopping local and improve community engagement, thereby driving sales and sustaining their business. Supplementing the local shopping experience with an online platform could allow independent businesses to not just survive in these tough times, but to thrive. One example of such a business is the historic St. Lawrence Market in Toronto, Canada.
Research & Planning
Initial Brainstorming
As a team of designers working to bring the St. Lawrence Market into the digital age of shopping, we knew it was necessary to research the strengths and weaknesses of the market, as well as of its direct and indirect competitors. What we found was that some markets were already successfully finding creative digital solutions to generate interest and engagement online. The Distillery District, for example, already had a modern, stylish site with a clear, intuitive design incorporating engaging features like an Instagram photo feed.
On the other end of the spectrum, other markets seemed to rely on platforms that looked as historic as the markets themselves. Outdated designs cluttered by information with no sense of hierarchy made their websites unfortunately difficult to navigate. Luckily, the St. Lawrence Market fell somewhere in the middle of the two extremes. With plenty of useful information already available on their site, there was ample opportunity for improvement in terms of re-organizing that information with a more modern, appealing design.
Introducing Our Personas
Based on the data we collected from conducting surveys and interviews with both St. Lawrence Market shoppers and vendors, our target personas began to emerge. By organizing our survey data points, we were able to identify patterns that helped shape our four primary personas.
With one local and one tourist shopper, we were able to take into consideration two sets of consumer needs. With two vendors, we were able to consider multiple perspectives regarding digital sales and use of online platforms. To meet the needs of both sets of our potential personas, we created user scenarios, user stories, and journey maps before bridging over from research and planning to the design process.
Designing the Online Experience
A Rough Start
Based on the needs previously identified, combined with the results of our competitor analysis, we finally began to sketch our rough design ideas. These sketches were no masterpieces, but allowed us to finally visualize the results of all our research and planning. The result? Seeing what worked, but also a lot of what didn’t work. A lot of design changes ending up occurring between our rough first sketches and our final prototype.
The Final Design
After many design iterations of the features we had in mind, our mid-fidelity designs were born. Our engaging home page immediately showcased highlighted vendors and events in our focal banner images, and went on to introduce visitors to upcoming events and shopping options. A simple navigation bar clearly listed the current day’s hours of operation, as well as quick links to social media channels. It further integrated social media by showcasing visitors’ captured images of the market in an ‘As Seen on Instagram’ section. This encouraged interaction with the marketplace online, without creating more work for the vendors to maintain individual online platforms.
We had now also ironed out the flow of navigating and booking events — a key feature of our redesigned website, since we found significant opportunity there. Our data showed that vendor engagement in events was high, but consumer awareness and turnout was disproportionately low. Enter our new design solutions!
The Outcome
Overcoming Challenges
Our group faced many challenges due to our significant time constraints. With this design sprint only being two weeks long, we had to constantly push along the process even if we weren’t fully satisfied with the previous step. A strict timeline meant doing the best that we could while learning lessons to apply to future projects. Though we had further ideas for improving the website, such as a login feature that allowed you save events to your own calendar and create a customized itinerary, we had to narrow our focus on the essentials in order to complete our work in a realistic time frame.
Conclusion
At the end of the day, our group made a strong attempt at packing a large amount of content into a cleaner, more efficient design than the existing St. Lawrence Market website. We learned about the importance of seeking clarification as early on as possible to avoid redesigning mistakes, and the value of conducting thorough UX research from the start to properly inform design decisions. I hope to take away valuable lessons from this project, and look forward to my next adventure as a designer. I also highly encourage checking out the St. Lawrence Market if you haven’t already for a uniquely historic marketplace experience.
Thank you for reading! Please feel free to visit my portfolio or LinkedIn if you’d like to connect or see more of my work.
