Brought in by the agency Ballyhoo in Birmingham, I was asked to update the designs for Derricks music website that they were in the process of modifying to make responsive and to add in new features to improve on their already impressive sales.
Derricks Music was already a well established shop within Swansea, with a well recognised branding using big and bold fonts and colours. Specifically a well recognised mural on the side of the building.
From a UX point of view, and with the structure of the site already developed as well, my first task was to get structure to each page with all of the required content to make sure that the hierarchy fitted with the requirements and knowledge of user behaviour, most notably focusing on the search bar first.
From a UI point of view, my first task was to understand how best to incorporate such a bold brand in to the site balanced alongside the required imagery of the mural and the imagery of the album covers and concerts that were on sale throughout the site.
The next task was to create an accessible colour scheme and rules around those colours, fonts and interactions. The font styling was particularly tricky as I had to take in to account the large variety of artist and album names which would be displayed on each product card at each of the various widths across each device type.
The main challenge within this site was tackling the amount of content that needed to be shown, the boldness of all of the graphics coupled with the need for various promotional areas. With all of that fighting for attention, it was key to get the balance right for the update to be successful.
