Quest Store & Quest Snow Centre
Overhauling snowboard and skate retail site and its sister ski hire site to improve navigation and user flows.
Overview
Details
Project
Website Heuristic & Information Architecture AnalysisRole
UX DesignerMethodologies
Heuristic Evaluation
Competitive Analysis
Traffic Analysis
Card SortingTeam
Liam Robb O’HaganDuration
1 week
Quest Landing Page
The benefit of fresh eyes; I asked the staff, “If I want to rent skis where do I go?” and they saw the problem straight away.
In response to the COVID-19 pandemic New Zealand shut its borders to all international visitors and imposed a 14-day hotel -bound quarantine on all citizens and residents returning from overseas. This killed the tourism industry and was particularly hard felt in the mountain resort of Queenstown. The foot-traffic into the Quest snowboard and skate lifestyle retail store dried up and the online store became a more important source of revenue.
Hopes that New Zealand could form a COVID-free travel bubble with Australia in time for the ski season (June-October) were dashed after an outbreak in Melbourne and the ski season became heavily reliant on domestic travelers who could not leave the country, further impacting the Quest Snow Centre ski and snowboard rental business.
I offered to UX the Quest Store and Snow Centre sites which are built in a shopify template. The goal was to test the site architecture and refine the Quest Store navigation and to streamline the rental process on the on the Snow Centre site.
How might we help shoppers better find the products the Quest Store sells and make the Quest Snow Centre ski or snowboard rental experience smoother?
Navigable or a Nest of Noodles?
The store navigation is complex and would require some tree testing and card sorting to determine the most logical structure.
Research
Heuristic Evaluation
I performed a Heuristic Evaluation of the sites and found a number of user flows that were indirect and options that were inconsistent across the sites.
Quest Snow Centre Homepage
The icons hint at what is on offer, but why make users scroll when you could have 3 buttons for renting skis, snowboards and clothing on the main image?
Competitive Analysis
I reviewed other ski and snowboard rental sites in from New Zealand and Australia, Europe and North America, as well as looking at the sites of some major clothing and sporting retailers
The good news was the website’s of local competition where generally less useful than the Quest Snow Centre site.
Most clothing retail sites organize their product using gender as the primary category. Quest’s need to have a the Burton category as a “store within a store” complicated the site architecture and the card sorting test results.
Continue Shopping
I recommended they replace this single link with some more specific links: Renting for more than one person? Add Skis | Add Snowboard | Add Clothes
Next Steps
I recommended Quest run A/B testing of the current navigation and a navigation using genderas the primary category. They could effectively do this using Shopify’s functionality.
Alternative Navigation
This Navigation is organized around gender, which has the advantage of containing fewer items making it easier to scan.
Other Case Studies
What is User Experience Design?
Designing for People
User Experiencer Design starts with empathy for the user of what is being produced. Through research we design the right thing and then we test to ensure we have designed it right. UX holds that a beautiful thing that doesn’t serve a need is not designed at all.