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frankie Magazine

frankie is a bi-monthly publication based in Australia, aimed at anyone looking for a magazine that’s smart, funny, caring and curious about the world. They champion self-expression in all its forms, spotlighting independent creatives from Australia and beyond, in print and online.

In addition to their magazine, they produce podcasts; Strictly Business, a small-business newsletter; SPACES, an interiors-focused book; the annual frankie diary and calendar and other lovely one-off publications. 

Problem Statement

Social media savvy Australian women aged between
25 to 35, often feel overwhelmed when browsing the frankie website. They want to be able to find the content and products they desire with ease, but do not know how to navigate the content heavy website.
My Role 
UX Researcher, Prototyping, UI Design
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Project Goals
​
  1.   Discover the pain points the website has and come
      up with a desktop prototype to solve these issues.  
     
  2.   Communicate more and encourage users to   
      purchase the bi-monthly magazine subscription.
     
  3.   Create an easier pathway through the website to
      purchase an item or subscription.
Project Goals
​
  1.   Discover the pain points the website has and come
      up with a desktop prototype to solve these issues.  
     
  2.   Communicate more and encourage users to   
      purchase the bi-monthly magazine subscription.
     
  3.   Create an easier pathway through the website to
      purchase an item or subscription.
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User interview synthesis
Approach

As a team began with qualitative research, interviewing target audiences by asking open ended questions and finding pain points.

My individual job was to do an heuristic evaluation on frankie's current website and point out flaws that affected the product's usability.

From a collective of information we synthesised a customer journey map to visually see the experience the users had when interacting with the website. 
 
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Customer Journey
Findings

We discovered that there was inconsistency in the brand throughout the website, especially when it came to entering the online shop. The online shop looked completely different from the homepage.

Users found the site difficult to navigate due to visual clutter, disorganisation of content and misunderstanding of the navigational bar.

Other findings that needed to be addressed included: font readability, CTA visibility and content classification. 

A MVP was create to determine what were the "low hanging fruits" that we could prototype and create the biggest impact.
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Prototyping UI Design

From the MVP, wireframing commenced. I created layouts and mapped out an information architecture chart to create an improved navigational bar through the use of MIRO.

We then created hi-fidelity prototypes through Figma. My role included creating interactions and ensuring the functionality of: interactive buttons, a  navigational bar and selectable horizontal carousel of items.

   
Final hi-fidelity prototypes
left: homepage       right: online shop
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Learnings

Never underestimate the power of brand style guides and orginisation. Having the online shop and homepage resonate the frankie brand throughout and categorising topics with colour, user testing showed that 8 out of 9 users said they would like to use this website more frequently and found the website easy to navigate through.
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