KDFOLDLITE

KDFoldLite is a company that sells and manufactures its own brand of lightweight and foldable electric wheelchairs. The goal of this web design project is to create a website to drive more awareness towards the pursuit of mobility by highlighting KDFoldLite’s product’s main features. The hope is to make the products more well known in Canada, to get people to realize the value portable electronic wheelchairs brings to people’s quality of life, and sell more products.

THE PROCESS

Research use cases and competitive analysis

Create wireframes, visual designs, and prototype

Create the brand style guide and design handoff

RESEARCH

Brand Research

I began my work with KDFoldLite by doing an in-depth analysis of their brand positioning, business objectives, and their goals for the website. By speaking with KDFoldLite's stakeholders, this helped me better understand the project scope as well as help me form ideas on what/who to look for when conducting user research and competitive analysis.

User Research

KDFoldLite's products are catered to all age groups with a specific emphasis towards people without mobility. To capture the perspectives of these diverse user groups, I sought out users through reaching out to friends, friends of friends, associations, and people in medical institutions. By speaking to these users and identifying their needs, goals, and challenges, this helped me understand what they wanted out of the product as well as the website experience:

71% of participants would recommend a friend to their wheelchair vendor because of their good customer service, timely responses, and knowledgeable staff.

85% of participants admitted to buying their chair only after they’ve been thoroughly assessed by a doctor or Occupation Therapist.

100% of participants want to know as much information about their products as possible before buying it.

BRAINSTORM

Following user research, I went on to conducting a thorough analysis on KDFoldLite's competitors. These included brands such as EZLiteCruiser, HME, Geo Cruiser, and Motion Specialists. My research helped me realize the following things:

Websites that showed a lot of product details (descriptions, specs, images, videos) appeared to be more trusted by users. While it's good to show lots of product information, too much can also risk information overload.
Vague product names can be confusing. Using better naming conventions can reduce user browsing times and result in quicker user purchases.
Most competitors are using comparison charts on their websites, but these charts are either static images or are not interactive.
Most competitors use inconsistent branding and low-quality images within a website. This projects poor branding.

By synthesizing the data above, this helped me identify ways where KDFoldLite could stand out in terms of branding, visual designs, product positioning, and customer support. I used sticky notes to jot down ideas, synthesize, and create a user flow that answered all the gaps discovered in my research.

I began by jotting down all the information gained through user interviews and competitive research onto sticky notes.

My next step was to group the information into similar categories, like: Product Information, Education, Customer Review.

Finally, I grouped the categories even more by identifying their overarching themes: Product, Contact, Learning Resources, etc.

BRAINSTORM

To meet our project deadlines, I opted for designing high fidelity wireframes to illustrate the finer details of the booking flow that low-fidelity or pencil sketches would not be able to show.

HOME

The home page is a simple yet effective landing point to the website that shows KDFoldLite’s extensive product lines, knowledge of its products, and quick access to expert help through the “Leave a Message” plugin.

PRODUCT

The Product Page has been designed for customers to customize their chair just the way they like it, and to also show a variety of product images/videos to help user better visualize themselves using the product.

COMPARE

The compare feature lets users easily pick and choose the chair of their choice, then compare its specs against another. This is effective since most users wanted a quick way find the right product for themselves.

ABOUT

Building brand awareness is very important. That is why this About Us page includes a number of facts about the company to help create a strong brand.

THE RESULT

As this project is still in the works, there may be changes to be made to the designs shown above. That being said however, the final prototype has been created and it will be ready for development shortly thereafter. The hope, once the website is launched, is to increase web traffic and bring more awareness towards foldable/portable electric wheelchairs.

Overall, this project has been one of the most satisfying opportunities I’ve worked on with a client. It gave me a chance to learn how to conduct thorough research through user interviews and competitive analysis, as well as learn how to synthesize this data to make meaningful design choices that meet business and user needs.

VIEW PROTOTYPE