Brand Introduction

Seisuke and Japanny are two high end Japanese knife shops under the same ownership. Seisuke focuses on the American market, based in Portland, Oregon. Japanny is based in Japan, run by Japanese staff, and therefore more in-tune with the Japanese customer base.

View current Seisuke site, and current Japanny site.

Stakeholder Needs

Seisuke and Japanny had participated in some intensive design sprints over the past year. They had identified the strengths of their existing brand and came to me with the following questions pre-determined:

How might we...

1) ...establish and implement brand identity?

2) ...establish a style guide?

3) ...improve UI design? 

Summarized Results from Branding Design Sprint

Seisuke staff and stakeholders chose images and words that felt like the Seisuke brand. This is a selection of words and images stemming from that exercise, tying in some colors and font direction from the current brand standards, with some new adjustments based on the stakeholder visions.

User Research

Survey deployed via Google forms, gathering both quantitative and qualitative data to better understand customers.

‍Key survey findings:

96% of respondents had never been to visit a Seisuke/Japanny store in-person. This was a surprising result, and reinforces the initiative to step up the company's digital presence for a seamless user experience.

It should be noted that the survey was in English, and distributed via e-mail to Japanny customers. We plan on deploying another version of the survey, translated to Japanese, to gather more representative data.

Nearly 40% of respondents chose Marcellus as a font that feels like Seisuke.

Marcellus: refined, authentic, airy, organic

Now, circling back to the stakeholders initial questions...

How might we integrate these findings into a UI that feels like Seisuke? 
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Mid-Fidelity Prototype

Iterated a prototype to create a visual representation of progress for the stakeholders. Presented two different applications of display font to communicate the impact of a seemingly minimal style change.

Stakeholders seemed to be initially leaning toward the Garamond font treatment, a slightly different direction than user feedback suggested.

Information Architecture (IA) Analysis

One of the challenges of this site structure is organizing the knives into a navigation structure that makes sense.

The current state of the website has column distinctions for brands, knife types and steel types. The selections are vaguely organized by popularity. Underneath "Knife Types," each knife has its Japanese name listed first, with a short English description listed next. There is room for improvement here - and usability testing gave us further insight into which pieces currently work, and how they might be improved.

User Testing - IA Feedback

Users that participated in our initial survey were also asked to confirm their availability and interest in further research. We selected 5 participants to interview for feedback on the existing site, branding direction and overall user experience.

This is what we learned:

[research is in process. this section will visually represent key findings, and include gifs of user tests]

Next Steps

Inclusive Development
Increase demographic diversity for user testing with Japanese language support

Find The Perfect Knife
‍Build out knife quiz section to include more knives and more user preferences

Research and Expand
Integrate more language translation options and features