Design for a local bike shop

Make bike selection more friendly

PROJECT OVERVIEW

Brook & Breeze is a low-impact transportation brand that offers steel, bamboo bicycles and cargo for city cycling enthusiasts. They design and build bicycles to make urban travel empowering, community-focused, and holistically sustainable in Shanghai, China. This is a real client project initiated during my contract with them as a designer.

What I did

  • User research

  • Competitor Analysis

  • Prototyping

  • Usability testing

ABOUT OUR PRODUCT

Low impact transportation - handcrafted bicycles

China is the biggest bicycle production and export base across the globe however the cycling remain to be unpopular tool in Shanghai and all over China. Brook & Breeze’s bikes are characterised by its adaptability for urban scenarios, such as pet biking, commuting, casual biking. Their bikes allow cyclist to customize their own bike to cater to their own changing needs, and also unlock different connections with the city and the neighborhood.

  • Highly adaptable and customisable bikes

  • Off-line community base

BACKGROUND

Increased demand for outdoor activity like city biking

The COVID-19 pandemic has fueled demand for bicycles as a popular means of transportation and propelled exports across the entire industry in China, with some bicycle producers' orders piled up into next year. However, the market is still in its early stages. Many customers visit the bike stores without the necessary knowledge to make informed choices.

Recognizing this gap, David, the founder of Brook & Breeze, saw the opportunity to improve the customer experience by assisting them in selecting the right bicycle.

Opportunities for new business abroad

Despite the pandemic, China continues to be the biggest bicycle production and export base across the globe, with 60 per cent of the total international trade generated from China. Southeast Asian countries used to be the traditional markets for Chinese bicycle producers, but the severe pandemic situation overseas has helped open the gates for more bicycles to enter the US and European countries. David also sees the overseas opportunity and plans to sell bicycles and related services abroad. Having a website is essential to overseas sales.

PROBLEM DEFINITION

Staff struggles to sell bikes in an efficient way

  1. The bike selection takes too much time and energy for the store staff. Customers need to choose bike parts one by one with a lot of guidance, suggestions and comparisons.

  2. The bike selection requires too much decision-making. Every bike was sold with complete customization. The order form provides more than 50 bike parts to choose from, requiring the customer to make up to 18 decisions.

  3. The bike selection is not inventory-friendly. The number of bike parts put pressure on inventory management.

  4. Staff at Brook & Breeze often experience moments of “awkwardness” or find themselves at a loss for conversation when engaging with customers.

Store display hampers bike sales support

The lack of organization in the store's layout impedes staff members from effectively assisting customers in the sale of bikes.

CUSTOMER JOURNEY MAP

Customers need to seek technical advice from salespersons

RESEARCH

Users use bikes for commuting, relaxing and casual city cycling - Most of our users are beginner in cycling

I conducted secondary research, survey and card sorting with potential bike consumers and Brook & Breeze bike owners to better understand:

  • What do they use bikes for

  • How do they select bike and bike parts

  • What makes their biking experience good or bad

  • What motivates them to bike more

53.85% of the participants use bikes for commuting, relaxing and casual exercising, 38.46% of the participants use bikes for dog walking, and 30.77% of the participants also mentioned using bikes to go grocery shopping. 0 of the participants used a bike for the competition.

When communicating with customers, it's important to avoid using bike terminology

Since our customers are not the professional bikers, the selection process should be more beginer friendly. However, the origianl bike menu during the bike selection process didn’t provide any explanation for the bike part options. After interviewing users, we came to understand the customers value the quality of the core components, safty, comfort the most while selecting a bicycle. Based on the card sorting results from 7 users, we are able to make a new categorization and structure of our bike menu.

COMPETITIVE RESEARCH

Competitors fail to provide a dedicated category catering to urban cyclists to quickly locate the ideal bike for navigating city streets.

The differentiating factor between my website and its competitors is that it is a dedicated bike company for city bikers and offers quick and easy bike matching and a highly connected lifestyle community beyond the bike product itself.

Design plan in 2 phases with estimated success metric

Phase 1

Redesign selection experience

Reduce time spent on each transaction

How might we reduce the complexity of the bike parts selection?

Phase 2

Redesign store display

Reduce the awakwardness for in store sales process

How might we effectively show our store products for users?

How might we reduce the awakwardness of the staff in the sales of our bikes.

ON-SITE DESIGN SOLUTIONS PHASE 1

Improve bike transaction efficiency

Pain points

Customers are required to make more than 20 decisions, each requiring extensive explanation. As a result, staff members experience fatigue after completing just one sale.

The bike selection is not inventory-friendly. The number of bike parts put pressure on inventory management.

ADDRESSING TOO MUCH DECISIONS

  • Less decisions to make

  • Less bike part terms to explain

  • Guided information for each package

Standardize the bike package and reduce disorientated customization

Recognizing that dense technical information impeded selection experience, I involved with operation and sales team to design four standardized bike packages based on customer’s major biking scenes. Each package has a fixed of bike parts and accessories instead of complete customization. The packages are tested in our social media content and sales process.

Package 1. Pet lover, Communter, Old School, Bike Packer

The pet lover package has proven to be a success, gaining notable social media explosure and increasing store visits. Overall, standardized packages suit user behaviour better. After several months of testing, bike packers has been removed because it doesn’t cater to our customers’ needs (city bikers). New package such as family bike are now being launched.

ADDRESSING THE AWKWARDNESS AND THE FATIGUE OF OUR STAFF

Have product trainings and give the staff a better understanding of the product (bike modules, parts and accessories)

ON-SITE DESIGN SOLUTIONS PHASE 2

Improve store display

Pain points

Lack of sales tools and supports

Not all items are displayed in the store with a price tag. When sales are busy with the first-comers, we want the rest of the customers explore the store by themselves.

No clear division between sales space and workshop space

The bike studio also hosts bike workshops and events, therefore it will clutter the space when different groups come into the store. If our sales don’t have a clear route to guide the customers, the customer will be flooded with all the items and inventories displayed in the store.

ADDRESSING THE LACK OF SALES TOOLS

Design sales tools for customers to explore the studio by themselves

The new bike menu was organized based on users’ card sorting. It is now categorized with an order that is based on consumers’ behaviour and industry standard.

ADDRESSING SPACE SEPARATION FOR DIFFERENT PURPOSES

Redesign the accessory wall and an in-store route to guide the customers

  1. Add price tags for product details and link for more information

  2. Add community events wall

  3. Add employee photos to enhance the community

Achievements

30% -

Reduction in time spent on one customer’s purchase offline

9000+

New followers in our social media

ONLINE SOLUTION

Transfer the on-site bike selection process into the online order experience

USER FLOW

WIREFRAME

High-fidelity wireframe

Design decisions

Product Detail Page

  • Provide more info for each decisions

  • Align with the design on other pages

Bike selection aid feature

  • Turning a marketing page into a more interactive page

  • A helpful page that includes bike knowledge and selection guide

  • We can leverage the contents we already have and put them on the website

Final design

REFLECTION

What else could be done?

  1. Launch the website

    Because of the time limit, I didn’t get the chance to launch the website and move forward with them in the website design. To start off, it is not uncommon for startups to choose a third-party website builder, such as Webflow, Wordpress or Shopify, to build their first version of the website. Moving forward, if I had the chance to work with them again, I would choose Shopify for the full E-commerce experience.

  2. Build 690 bike community

    After several rounds of sales boosts, we have gained notable amount of memebers. Therefore, we also want to design for retention. In this case, design and build a community that will encourage people to bike more.

  3. Testing and iterate more

    I was lucky enough to work on a broad range of things while working at Brook & Breeze, but I lack the testing on my design solutions and iterations based on the testing feedback.