Logan Ahern

January - February 2024

Help Boardshop

Discovering the current user pain points when shopping for snow and skate gear, to make informed design enhancements to Help Boardshop's website.

UX Designer • Solo Project • E-Commerce Design

Through my research, I discovered that users need access to a variety of information in order to make an informed and confident purchase decision. This gear is technical, and people have questions.

Knowing that Help uses a Shopify website, my solution consisted of adding a product description area, and larger product images, as seen above.

I posted in Snowboarding Facebook Groups to find people to interview and reached out to an old teacher who let me interview their current students who skateboard.

Through 5 interviews, I found that Help's current site lacked sufficient product information, causing users to want to leave and explore other options, potentially leading to lost sales.

Here is what the average journey looked like for the users I interviewed.

From Affinity Mapping my interviews, I deduced my target user.

Taylor is a boy or a girl who loves to stay active. They like to shop local to support small businesses and often shop online for convenience. When shopping online, they need easy access to information to ensure the product fits their needs. In-store, they rely on staff for guidance, so online, they seek similar support.

In short, Taylor needs access to a variety of information to make an informed purchase decision.

I brainstormed design solutions from writing out how might we statements, and sketching out ideas from there.

Here is the sketch, that I primarily went with that ensured large product images, up to date trends, adding areas for a description, but keeping it realistic and accessible for a small business to tackle.

It's important to note that this company sells multiple brands and likely doesn't have the resources to create designs that require extensive edits, like those seen with Jones Snow below.

After testing, 3/3 Users believed they had all the information available to make a purchase decision, compared to 0/5 users before.

Thank You!