Austin Business Woman Redesign

Scope: Elevate the e-commerce experience by improving product discovery for customers and enhancing business owner profile pages for clarity and usability

Participants: Myself, Jeromy Coleman & Alexis Yarnell

Duration: Three week sprint

Empowering Women-Owned Businesses in Austin In response to the pandemic’s economic impact, Olga Adler launched Austin Business Woman—a platform to connect and promote women-owned businesses across Austin. With a strong mission but an underperforming website, Olga teamed up with our team to bring her vision to life.

We redesigned the platform to be simple, intuitive, and beautiful—supporting both business owners and customers with a layout that makes discovery easy and community connection seamless.

Discovery

Initial usability testing of the current website, Comparative & competitive analysis, Survey, Heuristic evaluation, Task analysis, Site-map, User-flows, User interview

Usability Testing Round 1:

To better understand how consumers and business owners were interacting with the site, we conducted usability testing from both perspectives—revealing three key insights.

Overwhelming Homepage

The homepage featured 26 sections, reflecting the client’s desire to spotlight as many businesses as possible—but the result was an overcrowded, overwhelming experience for users.

Repeating Calls to Action

Users reported difficulty finding key features, leading to duplicated buttons across the interface—like a “Home” tab appearing both in the global menu and beside the login button. A separate “Homes” tab for real estate listings further added to the confusion.

New Member Onboarding:

Signup confusion was a major pain point—business owners struggled to register without guidance, while customers weren’t sure the site was meant for them, as it appeared primarily targeted toward vendors.

Membership plans were difficult to compare due to excessive scrolling and inconsistent visual design. While each plan—Premium, Professional, Essential, and General User—contained helpful details, poor readability, mismatched styling, and unclear naming (especially the “General User” tier) left users confused. Many also misunderstood the site’s purpose, mistaking it for a networking platform rather than a tool for discovering local goods and services.

Competitive Analysis - What are other directories doing?

Key Findings:

  • Clear distinction between target audiences

  • No separate user accounts (or shared accounts for users and businesses, as seen in MyArea)

  • Business information was easy to access

Comparative Analysis - What are the experts doing?

Key Findings:

  • Amazon and Yelp offered separate onboarding flows for business owners

  • Etsy linked business onboarding to existing user accounts

  • All platforms featured a prominent, easy-to-locate search bar

User Survey:

Understanding Online Shopping Habits To enhance Austin Business Woman’s shopping experience, we surveyed users about e-commerce, convenience, and local support.

  • Participants: 12 surveyed

  • Age range: 58.3% between 29–39 years old

  • Local support: 100% want to support local businesses, but find it hard when shopping online

  • Shopping behavior:

    • Arrive knowing what they want

    • Read reviews

    • Save and compare products

Google Analytics:

Site Analytics (Sept 1 – Nov 1, 2021)

  • 33.5% of users were aged 25–34

  • 12.6% were returning visitors

  • Most visited pages:

    • Home

    • Buy

    • Search Results

    • Jobs

  • Bounce rate: 60.1%, significantly higher than the 47.4% e-commerce average

Planning

Personas, Hypotheses, User-flows, Site-map

Task Analysis

A key challenge was simplifying onboarding. I analyzed each step of the current process and compared it to platforms like Etsy and Yelp. Etsy offers a comprehensive but complex flow, while Yelp keeps things quick and simple. Austin Business Woman had little to no onboarding—especially for customers. We saw an opportunity to merge the clarity of Yelp’s structure with light e-commerce elements inspired by Etsy, creating a more intuitive experience for both audiences.

Personas & Target Audience - Personifying two user flows

Business Persona: Sarah Griffith

Owner of Sarah’s Candle Lab

Needs and Expectations:

  • To showcase her products.

  • Drive more customers to her e-commerce website.

  • Network with other female business owners.

  • Grow her candle business.

Customer Persona: Shannon Ringer

Holiday Gift Shopper

Needs and Expectations:

  • To shop for women owned, local businesses.

  • Be able to save items she likes.

  • Read reviews and follow recommendations.

  • Find multiple products in one place.

  • Be able to search for specific items.

Hypothesis 1: Shannon’s Solution

We believe that by making the shopping experience reflect common e-commerce experience, and by providing a clear message when users are being taken to a new page Shannon will be more comfortable shopping on the Austin Business Woman website since it feels more familiar.

Hypothesis 2: Sarah’s Solution

We believe that by creating a minimal design and clarifying website language, Sarah will better be able to utilize marketing options and better advertise her products.

User-Flows - Customer and Business owner

Site-Map

Streamlining the Global Menu Usability testing and a heuristic review revealed that the original global menu was overcrowded, making navigation overwhelming. While Olga wanted to showcase a wide range of services, we saw an opportunity to improve usability by organizing content more efficiently.

  • Original Menu: Home, All Businesses, Digest, Buy, Deals, Photos, Videos, Event, Blogs, Work, Homes

  • Redesigned Menu: Home, Browse Businesses, Shop Goods and Services, Events, Media, About, Contact

To support this shift, I developed a site map to guide our redesigned structure and simplify user experience.

Designing

Sketching, Wireframing

 Sketching:

Wireframes:

Usability Testing - Round 2

A/B testing & Iterations

A/B Testing:

Improving the Membership CTA To boost visibility, we tested two placement options on the homepage:

  • Option A: Small CTA in the top right corner, next to the login

  • Option B: Larger CTA placed lower on the page

  • Winner: Option A—more noticeable and effective

Clarifying Onboarding Language We updated the business onboarding button from “Become a Member” to “List Your Business” to reduce confusion and better reflect the action for new vendors.

What Shannon Is Looking For?

  • Breadcrumbs for easier site navigation

  • Grouped products to minimize vertical scrolling

  • Filtering options:

    • Category

    • Item type

    • Price

    • Special offers

    • Distance

  • Ability to 'like' items, saved to a personal dashboard for later

Membership Description Page Feedback

We redesigned the page from a basic list format to three side-by-side boxes, each with a brief description. Usability testing revealed key opportunities for improvement:

  • Layout: Users preferred a traditional comparison matrix with a grid and check marks for easier scanning

  • Missing Information: Prices were not included—making it harder for users to compare options

  • Content Clarity:

    • Brief descriptions were appreciated

    • Users wanted more detail on specific perks (e.g., Digest, Social Media Stats)

    • “Highlights” implied more content—users requested a clear “Read More” option

High Fidelity Designs

Design System Contributions

  • Global Menu: Added a subtle blue underline on hover, drawn from our style guide, to provide visual feedback and reinforce brand consistency.

  • Buttons: Introduced hover states with a black outline and slight rounding—offering a tactile cue inspired by current UI trends to indicate interactivity.

Homepage Enhancements

  • Streamlined layout for a cleaner, more focused user experience

  • “Member of the Week” feature added as a key spotlight element, also promoted on social media

  • Events calendar redesigned to be more prominent and interactive, improving user engagement

Hierarchy:
Greyscale:

Users were concerned about the hierarchy of information on the business profile pages. We decided we could tackle this by moving valuable information such as, the map/location, basic information about the business and the business owner bio closer to the top of the page.

  • Since all of the information couldn’t live in the same place, we decided that by adjusting the size and spacing of page elements, each one would be highlighted equally in a way that makes sense to the user.

Hi-Fidelity:

All of Sarah’s candle lab information is at the top of the page:

  • Logo

  • Mission

  • Location

  • Contact and Social Media

As you scroll, featured products for sale, followed by Sarah’s bio, “The Woman Behind the Business.” 

There is space for more information about the store and a space for blog postings or other content she wants to share on the page.

Shop Goods & Services:

  • Shannon can either use the search bar (Figure A) to look for specific products or brows e using the the Shop Goods and services Tab (Figure B).

  • The team made sure to showcase the filtering menu on the side bar. As Shannon, our customer is looking for candles she can filter through content to find what she is looking for.

  • The bottom of the screen also includes a list of deals and coupons!

Figure A

Figure B

Product Description & Third Party Website Disclaimer:

After selecting a product Shannon can see a description of the product, reviews, social media links and ads for more products from Sarah’s Candle Lab.

We added a disclaimer to the product description itself as well as a pop-up when you click “Purchase this Item.”

Users were actually very excited to know they were traveling to a third party website to make purchases. They thought it was great that they got to see more of the business and felt the purchasing process was much more honest.

The Hi-Fi Matrix

Our user’s liked that the membership plan descriptions were next to each other but there was room for improvement. Now when new members are adding their business they get all the information they need, including the price, an option to read more about each perk and an option to schedule a phone call if they need it.

At first glance, the check marks make the benefits of the executive plan stick out. This is meant to increase trust from our users because they will have a better idea of what they are getting and how to use it.

When Sarah decides to renew her membership next year, she will be more include to sign up for the executive plan!

Responsive Design:

It was extremely important to us and our client that the directory work well on mobile devices.

We designed each of our flows in a drop down column format for iPhone 13.

Being able to filter through goods and services is still very easy. The icon under the burger menu at the top is commonly placed as a filtering icon.

From anywhere, Shannon is still able to narrow down her search to find exactly the gift she needs.

Listing your business is also very easy on the go!

Under the account icons, business owners are taken to a scrollable matrix. Our more traditional Martin is better suited for a laptop or desktop screen.

Each other the business plans are easy to see on one screen this way and business owners can compare features easily.

The product description and business profile page look very similar, just conduced into scrollable columns.

The product description page has everything Shannon will need to make a good purchasing decision.

When you hit purchase this item the same disclaimer about moving to a third party website appears.

The business profile is very scrollable. we wanted to keep customers engaged by keeping the same hierarchy.

Deliverables:

For a full rundown of our research please click here, or on the image below which will take you to our project report. There you can read extensively about our research and synthesis or simply observe our charts and Figma file in the Appendix.

My Contributions

Collaborated across the team on:

  • Usability testing

  • Competitive analysis

  • Persona creation

  • Client and developer meetings

  • Survey development

  • Final project report

Led or directly contributed to:

  • Task analysis and user interviews

  • Site map creation based on the redesigned global menu

  • Wireframes for product description and business owner profile pages

  • Discussion guides for usability testing

  • High-fidelity prototypes for key pages

Methodology Overview

  • Our design process combined research, analysis, collaboration, and iterative design:

    • Research & Evaluation:

      • Usability testing (current site)

      • Heuristic evaluation

      • Comparative & competitive analysis

      • Survey and user interviews

      • Task analysis & affinity mapping

    • Planning & Ideation:

      • Site map & user flows

      • Design studio workshops

      • Sketching sessions

    • Execution:

      • Wireframes

      • High-fidelity mockups

      • Developer collaborationHeuristic evaluation

  • Task analysis

  • Affinity mapping

  • Site-map

  • User-flows

  • User interview

  • Design studio

  • Sketching

  • Meeting with developer

  • Wireframing

  • H-fidelity mockups

Thank You!

This project was truly wonderful to work on. Our client has an amazing website that is building a community of women. As a team, we were so honored to work on a project that not only improved the business for one person but hopefully many.

During our sprint we found there was more potential to work through but unfortunately with our limited time, it did not fit into our scope. The developer was kind enough to speak with us about our designs and evaluate what was possible. We conducted a card sort to try and narrow down some of the categories listed on the site but because of the way they are stored on the backend, the task will be tedious and expensive.

However, we did learn a lot about the power of APIs which help others format their content to match our clients, that was a big win.

Again, this project was a true joy. My team mates are amazing and we are so thrilled to have this on our portfolio.

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