Design Process

• Research

• Persona

• Heuristic Evaluation

• Wireframes

• Prototype

Research

Target audience

Tenaya's target audience consists of climbers of all skill levels. From beginners who have tried bouldering and want to buy their first pair of shoes, to highly skilled professional climbers.

Conversion goals

The conversion goals of the Tenaya website is to guide customers into purchasing Tenaya products, preferably climbing shoes as this is their main product.

Experience goals

To purchase a pair of Tenaya climbing shoes should give the customers a sense of confidence that they will be able to progress in the sport.

Persona

I created a fictional persona that I based around friends that I know are climbers of different skill levels. Most climbers who visit climbing gyms are fairly well off, as the material costs of this sport are not insignificant. There is also a high representation of tech sector workers who participate in the sport.

Heuristic Evaluation

(Please note, my evaluation of this website was made based off the 2022 version which has since been updated, I am using screenshots gathered through archive.org)

1. Visibility of System Status

Visiting the shop page, an unconventionally placed breadcrumb menu appears underneath the shop category header, a location where users might not be used to see it.

An attempt is made to convey the visibility of the system status, but it could be improved.

There are also several instance of the same navigation displayed, in the sidebar and underneath the top menu.

When clicking on the "STORIES" menu icon, the user is taken to a blog where navigating back to the main page can be done only by clicking "SHOP", the logo takes the user to the blog first page instead of the expected main page.

Suggestions for improvement include repositioning the breadcrumb to a more conventional place, and also incorporating the blog page into the main page.

2. Match Between System and the Real World

The shopping cart/bag is placed next to the "USER" menu option and isn't clearly indicated.

Improvement suggestions include making the shopping cart area recognizable at a clance by appending a text label to the icon, and replacing the "USER" option with a more commonplace "Register/Sign in" option.

3. User Control and Freedom

When checking out, the only way a user is able to remove an item from the cart is to change the item quantity to 0 in a dropdown menu.

A suggested improvement is to implement a more conventional "remove from cart" option" for each cart item.

5. Error Prevention

The website has a clearly marked back button if the user navigates to a non-existing page, however the page design is no longer consistent with the main page design.

If the user performs a searches for a term that doesn't return any matches, there is no suggestion on how to improve the search. There is also an inconsistency with the placement of the search menu.

A suggestion to improve on these issues is to unify the design of these pages, and include related search suggestions if there is not a match for the search.

Wireframes

Final Prototype

Home

Search

Shop Menu

Product Page

Cart