The brief was to design the brand and app of a high end, ethical homeware company called Abode, that sells everything from sofas to beds, lighting, storage and more. The aim of the online store is to help users find products quickly and easily that match their particular needs, as well as being visually appealing and user friendly.
Branding
User Research
User Flows
Wireframing
Prototyping
Figma
Illustrator
Flinto
Using customer interviews and creating user personas we found some pain points users encounter and features they find useful.
"With a lot of different products on offer in different categories, finding what I want quickly and easily is important."
"The app would need to be a lot more streamlined than just going onto the website, I don't download apps I don't need"
"Having a good search function and the ability to filter search results is a priority, spending ages searching for a specific product is a pain!"
"It's nice to have a wishlist or somewhere to refer back to products I've already looked at."
We were inspired by nature for this project, as it needed to draw from the brand ethos of sustainability, ethically sourced materials and high quality product design.
We used organic, fluid shapes and muted hues to imitate the shapes and colours found in nature. The modern and fun but professional font is clear and approachable.
Based on feedback, we made the colours more vibrant, adjusted some sizing and spacing on some icons, and added some on states to the navigation to make it clearer where you are within the app.
Having never designed for a homeware brand before, I learnt the importance of having multiple filtering options to help users with their specific search, and iterating on designs based on feedback from users throughout the design process.
Adding the ability to share a product with friends/family via Whatsapp, Messenger etc, would be a useful feature to add to the next iteration of the app.
Also adding a link to the Abode social media pages would increase the reach of the brand, and sponsored adverts on these platforms would increase traffic to the site and therefore app downloads.