The Bike Lane E-Commerce Website
Background
The Bike Lane is a bike shop in Chicago. They launched their first website in 2017 mostly for simple fact that it looks bad if you don't have one.
Pain Points
Their current website is cumbersome to navigate, and does not include several E-commerce best practices. For this reason, among others, they are not considered to be a serious option for cyclists looking to shop online.
Business Goals
Since launching their first website, they have steadily grown and begun considering E-commerce and expansion. With a enterprise-level website, they could increase sales and accelerate the process of scaling up their business.
HEURISTIC EVALUATION
Process and Insights
To collect this data, I observed cyclists interacting with The Bike Lane's original website. I asked them questions about their experience throughout and after.
Because the site deviated from various well-established standards, it was difficult to navigate and thus inefficient to use for most e-commerce tasks.
OLD INFORMATION ARCHITECTURE (IA)
Insights
The IA of their existing website had several glaring issues: there were too many duplicate links, there were way too many items in the Components category, and the top menu was missing key sections
New Information Architecture
Outcome
Aided by analyzing larger online bike shops and user interviews, I re-organized the website's content so that no category contained more than 7 sub-categories.
Homepage Comparison (Old ON THE Left)
By implementing tried and true E-commerce best-practices, I increased the site's potential for as a revenue driver. Users remarked that the reorganization made browsing much easier and enjoyable.
Users expressed that buying a bike be intimidating because its a big commitment, and there are so many options. For this reason, I included a Bike Buying Guide as well as a Frame Size Guide.
I also utilized a hover-activated drop down menu for quick and easy browsing. This was inspired by Nike.com.
Even though the store doesn't currently have an expansive inventory (compared to enterprise-level bike shops), their shoppers could still benefit from checkbox search filtering. This feature would be necessary if they store achieved their goal of adding all of their inventory to their website.
This comparison illustrates how their old website lacked basic industry standards. Adding a top menu and breadcrumbs made navigating the site much easier.
Next Steps
This is a concept project. Unfortunately, the store has not yet been able to allocate resources to updating their website. If they wanted to, I could help them produce all of the content needed to launch an enterprise-level E-commerce website.