Briefing
To begin this project, we got into groups, and based on our skills throughout the past projects, Mara had asked myself, Max, Rob, and Harry to be in a group with her as we could all contribute well and work together to create something really good.
After the initial brief given by Graham, the creative director of virgin wines, we had to begin thinking of questions to ask him, which we had done throughout the process on a Miro board set up to throw random questions into where we could then pull out the most appropriate ones to ask.
We learnt a lot of different things about the company, and took some key notes which were then later transferred to another board. Everyone took separate notes but had the opportunity to place them together which was really useful.
We then used Trello to set up a few different tasks for people. Here, my first one was to set up all the possible Miro boards that I thought we would need, and then add some along the way if needs be. I set up one for Heuristics, Initial ideas or the initial board we used to work on, a competitor analysis board, and one for interviews when we got around to it.
Heuristic Evaluations
To start the project, we did heuristic markups of the three pages we were going to look into. Checkout, live events, and about us. All of the group did this in their own sections, outlining the positives and negatives. Then, in groups we divided up the workload for our heuristic analysis. Myself and Harry tackled checkout, where I did an in depth ‘deep dive,’ of the mobile version and he did the website, with the others doing their own for the different processes.
Heuristic Evaluation Outcomes
Afterwards, we drew together all of the notes that had been made in regards to the heuristic evaluation, placing them all together so that we could group them and categorise their solutions. Most notes overlapped in multiple areas, but in some places they were just singular issues. We made a refined infinity map, focussing on the problems that were being faced in certain areas. Myself and Harry had more of a focus on checkout, and so we laid those our together before moving on to highlighting pain points. It was really useful to do this all as a group, because even though we all did a heuristic markup of the pages, we each only did a deep dive into the heuristic analysis of one section.
The final part of this was to gather them all together, and think of the solutions – or what we need to do in order to come up with a solution. For our focus, these included notes such as: ‘The design of the page is busy, dated, and messy. Do visual research on other sites to see what we could do better.’
Competitor Research
Afterwards, I began looking into the other virgin wine companies and their brand systems, having found out that the three things they had to follow were noted as the ‘language, red colouring, and virgin logo.’ having ‘80% freedom, 20% limits.’ This is important because whilst one company within virgin may do something really well, another might not, and so I thought to check within their own systems to see where we can find some hints using another heuristic evaluation of a few of their most popular sites whilst the other members of the group did competitor research into the specific areas.
I looked into Virgin Atlantic, the Virgin website, and Virgin Experiences to gain insight on this, and then found pages similar to what we are looking into, before doing a quick heuristic markup, and putting the most valuable information to one side.