Overview
ShirtsByMike.com is an e-commerce website selling fun and creative printed t-shirts of Mike, the mascot fronting the online technology school Treehouse. They also wish to include a featured t-shirt of the month on the website.
Note: This is a conceptual exercise.
Problem
ShirtsByMike.com has two main goals for the redesign:
- Launch a featured t-shirt of the month
- Increase t-shirt sales by 20%
The owners of the website have identified two main problems:
Problem 1: The website's branding is dated
Problem 2: The content looks stale as there's no new campaigns and designs
Audience
I wanted to extract paint points that were not addressed by the current ShirtsByMike.com website. With the initial data provided by ShirtsByMike.com, and reading up social media profiles and portfolio pages of past and current students from Treehouse, I created an empathy map and a journey map for the persona, Motivated Mike.
Solution
As the problems had been broken down, I was able to make the specific changes while keeping the overall use case in mind to ensure that the design is coherent and useful.
The original website has a good generic design foundation so my focus was on optimizing the shopping experience. On the theme side, I thought a more obvious link from ShirtsByMike to Treehouse would make the purpose of the site more obvious - hence the Treehouse color palette. I tried to align the voice and personality to Treehouse using a more casual tone.
Besides the mock-ups, I have included the mood boards to show my design considerations.
Solution 1: Update the design elements to reflect the mascot's personality
Solution 2: Design for a stronger brand connection from Mike the Frog to Treehouse, and the community
