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The Cave
Personal Redesign Project Pitch
UX/UI Design, Research & Branding
20 Hours
Adobe XD, Photoshop, & Illustrator
The Cave is a climbing gym that I've been a member of for almost a year. I've been very involved with this community and find this aspect to be a huge part of why I still continue to attend this gym. With my knowledge and experience of being a UX Designer and a Climber, I wanted to make design improvements to their online website & branding while keeping the customer's experience in mind.
The Cave Climbing Gym is the first boulder-only gym at Mississauga that welcomes all levels of climbers to join the fun, energetic, and supportive community that empowers each other.
Since this project has limited resources and a shorter timeline, we will have to make some assumptions to help us move forward in the project. Assumptions such as:
Although we do not have access to in-person user interviews, I manage to collect some data onlinethrough Google reviews with customer feedback on the company.
I will also do a competitive analysis on The Cave’s competitors to see the differences, and to analyze things I could do similarly and differently from the rest.
Going through The Cave’s competitors’ websites & reviews, I’ve noticed that most of the gyms seems quite intense and aren’t as beginner friendly compared to The Cave. Especially within the reviews section, there’s not much mentioned about the community or service; more so about the physical space. Furthermore, The Cave is the only gym that provides an array of extra physical exercises like Kickboxing & Muay Thai.
Although, it is evident that all the competitors’ websites are more professional and well established comparing to The Cave’s. The Cave’s navigation & information architectur eare also very confusing.
Knowing this I will create a website that can highlight The Cave’s strengths and create a unique experience for the users.
From the users review we collect and using my own personal knowledge with the people I have interacted with in the gym, I will create 3 user personas that encompasses common people that usually visits the gym.
I will be keeping these users in mind throughout my process.
The information architecture of the current website can be confusing and repetitive creating a horrible user experience. By laying out the current information architecture, we can see an overview of all the information in the website, remove all unnecessary and repetitive information, reorganize, and categorize information to be grouped.
Since there is a lack of access to the analytics of the website, there will be some assumptions made to what is important and what the click traffic is.
With the new information architecture, we have a guideline when designing the web pages and putting information in the appropriate location.
I wanted to create a story where people can relate to when visiting and learning about The Cave on their website.
The first-time meeting people is always the hardest because there is always some tension during conversation where you must break. By communicating the gyms expectation and friendly ethics on their website will help create a sense of community within the gym and allow new climbers to feel comfortable when coming to the gym for the first time. An extra feature I created for the customer experience was to create a team jersey with different labels such as, coach or assistant which will help new members differentiate regular customers and those who are professionally trained to help you during your visit.
Starting something new might be overwhelming and difficult because of the unknown. By breaking down overly complicated information into simple steps will help digest important information for new climbers. This will reduce a lot of guess work for new customers and reduce any obstacles for those who wants to get started.
Furthermore, right from the home page there is a call to action for all the 3 user personas mentioned, Mia, David, & Andrew.
The main CTA at the hero banner talks about the gym itself and the community within it. The next CTA is for the new climbers, & first timers at the gym. The next is for those people who are looking for additional fitness services. Finally, at the very bottom is all the current news & blogs about how to improve your climbing, & the gym’s updates.
I believe with the limited resources and the assumptions that had to be made, this project was successful. The purpose of this project was to challenge myself to improve a company close to my heart with the knowledge I have of the company and the community. Being able to incorporate what other people said about the company to this brand-new website while keeping in mind Mia, David, & Andrew persona, and creating a new information architecture that is more fluent is a great achievement. With this website any type of users can navigate through the website easily.
I believe with the limited resources and the assumptions that had to be made, this project was successful. The purpose of this project was to challenge myself to improve a company close to my heart with the knowledge I have of the company and the community. Being able to incorporate what other people said about the company to this brand-new website while keeping in mind Mia, David, & Andrew persona, and creating a new information architecture that is more fluent is a great achievement. With this website any type of users can navigate through the website easily.
How you receive information is so important, and it is an aspect of UX Design. I was overwhelmed by the current information architecture of the website and how negligent the information is layout. But once I’ve slowly created the new information architecture, everything seems to fall into order and everything makes sense. It’s incredible the power of categorizing information and organizing it in a where it is comprehendible.
Although some of the user research and assumptions I made worked out, it would be great to properly do user research to see if the decisions I made matches up and find any incorrect information.
As nice as Unsplash images are, it would be amazing to get proper imagery from the actualcommunity, team, and gym to make more of consistent and relatable experience.
One of my personal goals was to recreate the entire new website in Weblow. Unfortunately, because of the lack of time I was not able to do so. Hopefully in the future I will be able to come back to this project and create a functional website.
