Site Redesign: Electric Fetus
A cautionary tale of discovery, design, and despair
The Background
Electric Fetus is a legendary record store and has been a staple of the
Minneapolis community since 1968. It is renowned for its collection of
new and used LPs, as well as unique gifts, clothes, and, (shall we say: medicinal) paraphernalia.
The current state site navigation is confusing, misleading, and at times perplexing. Several genre categories are listed under “shop music” as well as special event releases, select featured artists, curated playlists, and some gift categories.
Why are candles and incense listed under “shop music” when there is a separate “shop gifts” global nav? Why does only a handful of artists and events have a link in the “shop music” tab? I intended to find out.
The Persona
The client provided demographic info on their target user who likes to shop in person rather than online, and enjoys the in-store browsing experience. My persona is Kara, who prefers to shop local and in-person. But she is unable to do so due to Covid. Kara needs an elegant way to recreated the in-store browsing experience online.
The Card Sort
To start the reorganization of the site’s nav, I did a card sort activity with 5 participants. As one can imagine, the participants grouped the genres in one pile, the curated playlists in another, and the event-related releases in yet another. The incense, candles, and other gifts were grouped into a “gifts” category.
Current state architecture - 35 categories under “shop music” shown in green
Future state organization per card sorting. “Shop Music” is now divided into 4 sub categories, with the “genre” tab blown out in the chart to the left.
Doesn’t that look better?
The Lo-Fi
My greyscale prototype kept the layout of the current page largely the same while incorporating room for our new dropdown menu categories. User testing here confirmed my navigation scheme is more intuitive and easy to complete a given task.
A task of finding a specific album and adding it to their cart was given to 3 participants. All were able to complete the task quickly and easily.
The Hi-Fidelity
Hi-Fidelity homepage prototype.
The UI is clean, easy to read and a comforting color palate. I cleaned up the album display to allow users to easily shop for specific albums, while still maintaining the browsing experience and exploration factor.
The newly designed “GENRE” tab for easy browsing based on user input from the card sort. No more sifting through 35 irrelevant categories to get what you want.
The Future
In the future, I would like to tackle the search bar as many of my testers reported
that they tend to use that feature when they know specifically what they’re looking for.
Current site search results for “Purple Rain.”
Confusing, disorganized, and hard to look at.
Spotify search results for “Purple Rain.”
Clearly organized by category all with image support.
The Grand Finale
I want to leave you with a revelation. A cautionary tale of design discovery. When researching my design and putting the final touches on my high-fidelity, I decided to take a break from design and go back to do some discovery. Why is this site layed out the way it is? Why are candles listed under music? Why are there 3 playlists listed with no content in them? After some research, I found the answer.
Our site, our beloved Electric Fetus site, is built from a template.
Our friends at Electric Fetus got their website through a marketing company based out of Virginia that offers content management and web hosting to some 40 odd independent record stores. That means 40 of the same perplexing navigation and same search functionality. Now, it doesn’t mean my work was any less valuable to our client. But it does mean I have about 40 new sites to design. So if you’ll excuse me….
