Goal
I took on redesigning the BoardGameGeek website to better meet the needs of today's gamers. The goal is to create a user-friendly design that's more focused, enticing, and intuitive.
Scope
For this project, I took on everything from IA to wireframing to final UI and coding with HTML5 & CSS3.
- Desktop
- Mobile
Challenges
- A lot of content to sift through
- No access to actual data
- 3-week timeline for all work to be completed
Current Design
Approach
I began by looking at the current experience of the website and found:
- Multiple paths to the same destination
- Content overload
- Lack of design consistency
- Too much copy
- Non-compliant design
After interviewing friends and doing research, I had a better understanding of user's needs — they wanted a forum where they can share/browse content which also has a way to get the games they want.
The new design presents a more traditional e-commerce experience, layered with user-generated content. This sets up some pretty intuitive navigation patterns and provides lots of opportunities to inject UGC. I edited down the navigation paths which open up as users start to dig into each section. This helps maintain focus and clean up a lot of the clutter from the original designs. The UI features rich imagery, cleaned up fonts and pops of color to distinguish the different sections of the site.
