Functional redesign

Home page

In the picture above the redesigned home page on the left is shown next to the original page on the right. This makes explaining the changes in comparison easier.

The original page seems to not have been designed for broad screens. To update the look and help the website fit better with wider screens, the sidebar has been deleted, as currently the sides of the screen show white. The buttons which could originally found here are partly combined and placed on top. Also the search box was integrated with the other buttons.

The search box is an important element of the site, but seemed very out of place in the top part of the screen. Also originally there was a second ‘Advanced search’ button in the sidebar. These are now combined into one button in the top bar.

The Facebook ‘Like’-button has been deleted, as it seemed very oppressive. The other social media links have been put in the bottom of the page. As these links contrast with the idea, that Velvet is an old school music store.

Also in the original page a lot of albums are displayed in the ‘New’ and ‘Expected’ categories. People found it hard to find a specific one during the tests, so these categories are now limited to three and are made slightly bigger.

CD page

From the tests it can be concluded that the original CD page has so much information on it, users found it quite hard to find the desired information. Therefore in the redesign a lot of the information next to the album cover that most users are not interested in or is not of any use to them, is left out. 

Also users told us they thought the interesting information like the track list was harder to find than the less interesting like the kind of disk and the release date. Therefore the sequence of the information was shuffled as well according to their statements and our own insights. 

Furthermore in the original page there are a lot of social media links. This kind of contrasts with the idea, that Velvet is an old school music store. Therefore a lot of them were taken out and the remaining have been put in the bottom of the page.

To make it possible for users of the site to get more of a feel for the product the option was added to listen to a preview of the music on the CD. For now this has been put in the same format as the other information displayed on the screen.

A lot of sites directed at music fans have a part where the site has suggested artists suiting your specific taste. People felt this was missing in the Velvet site. Therefore in the redesign this was added. This links to a page with information about the artist’s autobiography and samples of their music.

The button used for buying the product is now put underneath the album cover in order to make this stand out more from the other informational elements. Despite the colour it was found from the visual tests, not everybody could find it as fast as the store would want.