Context
Retail is an ever-evolving beast. While E-commerce constitutes an increasing portion of overall consumer spending, a recent Census Bureau study reported that Internet shopping still only represents about 11 percent of total retail sale expenditure.
Further, a recent PWC Global Consumer Insights Survey reported that there has actually been an increase in weekly brick and mortar shoppers over the past three years. How can we capitalize on this trend and convert visitors to an online website to real-life customers?
Brief
I had the opportunity to design a brand new website for Avalon Flooring, the 10th largest floor covering retailer in the nation with locations in New Jersey, Delaware, and Pennsylvania. While the face-to-face experience for customers was the business’ priority, they now wanted to enable customers to browse their products online.
The site needed to encapsulate the key features of their business model: customer service, reasonable pricing and keeping it local and enable customers to complete the main tasks: browse products, discover and save ideas, compare options, learn about installation, and get inspiration.
Research
I began the process by identifying the three main competitors in the flooring market and comparing their online offerings. I was keen to identify common features across the sites and spot opportunities for Avalon Flooring to differentiate.
The competitors I decided to focus on were Floor & Decor, LL Flooring, and Build Direct with each targeting slightly different customer demographics due to their designs and price points.

The most important takeaway from this activity was learning how different retailers organized their flooring selection and the overall layouts they used for those websites.
After completing my competitor research, I then went on to complete a mind map. For this project, the needs of the business and its customers/user personas were already logged in an extensive document. All together this list was overwhelming, so I referred to the technique of mind mapping to help me deconstruct it. This activity helped me categorize the information into more defined ideas, and then establish relationships and hierarchy among those ideas.


Outcome
The client was thrilled with their new look and our developers worked tirelessly to execute the vision. You can check out the finished site here.

In retrospect, I wish we did more usability testing and research to uncover additional pain points that would lead us to making better design decisions. One critical takeaway from working on this project was understanding the value of user research and planning to synthesize findings in the most helpful way to our users within our resource constraints.