My role: UI/UX Design and Research

Tools: Sketch, Invision

Deliverable: High-fidelity mockup of redesigned website

MUJI is a Japan-based retailer that offers a selection of products including household goods, apparel, and food. 

They take a simplistic and unbranded approach to their products. Their aim is to produce low-cost and good-quality products. 

Based on multiple site visits at two different MUJI store locations, the biggest customer base seemed to be Asian Teenagers. I would have liked to have data for both in-store and online-store demographics for a more accurate representation. I used the persona as one guide for my design decisions.  The most popular section of all site visits was the consistently the stationary section. 

To get a better understanding of what the company wants to express through their products and stores, I looked into their About Page. Now this could be a severely poor source of information if the about page were to not be an accurate representation of what the business' goals and needs. However, for the purpose of this project I went with this as a high-level list of details about the company. 

From looking at their website, their goal is to give customers "rationale satisfaction" in their purchase and to promote "No-brand quality goods". 

For the landing page, the main concern was information hierarchy and organizing the content in a way that can still promote what the company is trying to push for while providing customers quick access to the products they want to look at. 

The current page has a lot of text and that could increase the time that a user has to look around a page. The design also seems outdated in that every bit of content is competing with each other. My iterations during wireframes involved thinking about balancing out content and still readily providing what is important to both the customer and company. 

For the product page, the idea was to clear out any redundant content that could be better organized and need not be looked [even accidentally]. The categories from the original website's design was always taking up a good portion of space on the screen that was not core to emphasizing the value of the product being looked at.

My iterations here after a couple of hand-sketches were to find a good place for the alternate images to be easily accessed and which pieces of content would be most important to a customer looking to buy something. In the wireframe below, the price, reviews, color, and size are the first things shown to indicate whether there is even an availability of the item. 

The current website seems to put a priority on product materials used, which may be because of the company's concept of producing quality goods-this may not be the first-most important aspect of a customer's purchase. The challenge here is going against the company's value of emphasizing the material [because they speak of the term "quality-goods"].

A way to measure this could be to conduct a survey asking what users' care finding about most in order of importance and potentially a few short interviews with MUJI's actual customers to get a more accurate representation of what their customers care about.

Working with a "best guess" approach with low amounts of data makes design decisions less convincing with little to no validation. The site visits had customer demographics that could have been strongly affected by the demographic of the people who live in those cities. Speaking to customers and employees at the store could only surmount to comments about the in-store experience they were working in.