Wikify website

About the project

Wikify is a responsive website for making custom designs based on permissively licensed or freely available images.

My role

The Wikify website is a one-man project — I was in charge of the full UX design process.

Project goal

The website will offer a gallery, a design-making flow and an e-shop integrated into the well known MediaWiki UI. The Wikify website will make it possible to explore the world of freely available media, create designs and order prints in one place.

Understanding the user

I conducted and evaluated one round of UX research. People who wear expressive garments were selected for the initial interviews.

The research made it clear that desktop remains the best platform for any designing pursuit. It also revealed that integrating exploration and design into one flow would make the UX rather rich and ramified.

Based on the initial UX research I was able to create two personas.

Persona: Steve

Steve is an outgoing chap who needs a funny and cheap way to show off, because he often goes out and likes to provoke conversation.

Initial design concepts

I started with clarifying the main main defining aspects and challenges and design constraints of the projects:

• Ramified main user flow: Integrating exploration of the media and creating the design into one process means that the user flow is not linear. The information architecture and navigation cues need to reflect that.

• Lots of content: There's simply too much content in the free databases. The website will need to accommodate for viewing and filtering of all these images .

With these constraints in mind, I drafted the information architecture and the sitemap.

Wireframes

Based on the information architecture, I started brainstorming and iterating sketches of the main user flow pages. Some ideas made it from the paper to XD as digital wireframes.

User testing

Having completed the full set of digital wireframes, I conducted a round of user testing. Aggregating the findings, I was able to identify three main insights:

• Large selection: The research confirmed that the UX would be dealing with large numbers of images to display and filter.

• Product comparison: The testers were worried that a design might look different printed on a different garment. This has to be dealt with on the designer page where a view for each product has to be made available.

• Modifying designs in cart: Multiple users commented on modifying a design that is already in the cart. It needs to be made clear that designs are always mutable and what goes into the cart is the print, not the design.

Mockups

Keeping the usability study results in mind, I completed a full set of mockups and a high-fidelity prototype for the main user flow.

Conclusion

It's not a surprise that the MediaWiki UI is very suitable for organizing of large amounts of content. This project made it clear that the user flow can be easily expanded with new applications inside the original UI while retaining all of the original benefits.