Gardener's Advice Redesign
Client// Gardener's Supply Company, Burlington, VT
Role//Interactive Designer
Year// 2022
Background
Enable site users to easily locate advice topics that interest them via browsing, especially on mobile.
Problem
Users are not viewing our content as much when they are visiting the site.
High-level goal
Make it easier for users to find advice content on our site that helps their gardening
Research
Current State Evaluation
Redefine categories and sub-categories of topics based on user input.
Currently the landing page for Advice is extremely outdated and broken. Create a new landing page that offers more options for the browser to discover.
New sub-category pages needed to breakdown the number of articles into more manageable information to users.
Competitive Analysis
Looked at many different competitor sites such as Universities, blogs, gardening competitor sites. Overall Gardener's needed a much cleaner and clearer navigation system. Gardeners needed to have some beginner categories as well as more advanced options for the expert gardeners. Plant Encyclopedias are an important way to get information to beginners as well as more advanced gardeners.
Ideation
Site Map
The next step was the create an inventory of all of the current articles that Gardener's has on their site as well as other articles that they are planning to create within the next year. After the full list was gathered, it was time to start bucketing the articles within similar groups to help create a new navigation system. It was broken down into types of gardening, landscaping & garden design, garden basics, pests & disease, and planning resources that contained digital tools to help with garden planning.
Lo-Fi Wireframes
The Lo-Fi Wireframes are created to make sure that destinations make sense to users as they navigate through the site before the time and effort is put into the prototypes and before coding can begin.
Hi-Fidelity Prototype
Gardener's Advice Redesign Comps
Using Adobe Xd hi-fidelity prototypes were created for each of the main landing pages for the redesign. A cleaner landing page with a rotating carousel of the top three articles for the season with a short description of each. There is a section below that with the Level 2 landing pages represented with iconography for each section and the title of the page below. There is a section for the top 3 trending articles that are automatically populated based on the data collected on the site as well as a section of the top 2 most popular articles on the site. Ending the page with 3 ads to top three planning resource tools.
Advice landing page
Level 2 landing page
Level 3 landing page
Final navigation drop down menu from top navigation