Overview
COGS 187B: Praticum in Professional Web Design
As a part of the Practicum in Professional Web Design course at UCSD, me and three others partnered with a local business, The Shop La Jolla, to improve their website’s usability, aesthetics and functionality. The Shop La Jolla offers a curated collection of local clothing brands and art supporting other artists and small businesses. The project involved real-world user research, competitive analysis, mood board creation, client collaboration, wireframing, and prototyping using Figma. The project consisted of 6 assignments ranging from a client survey to the final prototype
Assignment 1
Client Survey
The first step of the project involved conducting a comprehensive client interview to understand the business goals, design preferences, target audience, and current pain points of the existing website. In preparation, my team and I developed a written agenda and a customized set of interview questions covering design, features, user needs, and business objectives. This ensured a professional, focused discussion and helped build a strong initial relationship with the client.
Through this session, we identified four core requirements:
Emphasis on creativity and uniqueness in design
Improved browsing and product customization features
Clearer storytelling about the brand and artists
More professional and branded aesthetic
This foundational research guided the next phases of our process. Click here to see our Client Survey and responses.
Assignment 2
User Interviews
To ensure our redesign met the actual needs of the intended audience, we conducted in-depth user research as a part of the second phase of the project. Using the client’s initial guidance on their customer base, we interviewed 11 users across different demographics and customer types. This allowed us to uncover real user goals, frustrations, and priorities that were not obvious to us from the get go.
From the data collected, we created three detailed personas:
David, the frequent customer
Andrew, the potential customer
Sarah, the non-frequent customer
For each persona, we developed two unique user scenarios, capturing real-life tasks and motivations. These scenarios were further broken down into specific use cases which are small tasks that occur in a user scenario for example: viewing the hours of operations for the store. From this, we created a Feature & Functionality Table to align user needs with client requests. This helped us prioritize which features were critical for the final redesign. Click here to see our full User Interview Report.
Assignment 3
Competitive Analysis and Mood Board
To inform the redesign of our client’s website, we conducted a competitive analysis of five thoughtfully selected websites. These were chosen based on their relevance to the apparel and furniture industry, strong brand presence, and well-executed features. The goal was to get design inspiration, functional strategies, and user experience best practices that we could implement into our project. In the end we chose these five websites:
From these five websites we conducted an in-depth analysis on each website’s branding, functionality, content, site architecture, and design. From our analysis we created a summary table of our findings:
For this assignment, we also created a moodboard to synthesize our color schemes, typography, and layout direction drawn from our analysis. We wanted to reflect a harmonious blend of simplicity, warmth, and modernity. This moodboard guided the visual design of all of our pages, particularly the homepage and product galleries:
Click here to see our full Competitive Analysis and Moodboard Report.
Assignment 4
Creative Brief
As the fourth phase of our project, we developed a comprehensive Creative Brief to define the vision, scope, audience, goals, and design direction for the client’s website redesign. This document acted as a shared agreement between the client and our design team, clarifying what would be delivered, why, and how. It helped align creative choices with business goals and ensured the project stayed focused and feasible. We determined that the redesigned website for The Shop La Jolla would support their expansion into customized furniture while showcasing their current catalog of art and apparel. With the enhanced functionality of custom orders and a modernized layout, the goal was to improve the shopping experience and improve sales. Click here to see our full Creative Brief.
Assignment 5
Mid-Fi Prototype
Click here for a full breakdown of our Mid-Fi Prototype
Assignment 6
Final Design
Click here for a full breakdown of our Mid-Fi Prototype