Neokyo is a Japanese Proxy Shipping Service that helps users from around the world find exclusive and rare items from hobbies and niches on Japanese marketplaces and then assist the user in shipping them to their country. 

Proxy shipping is a new concept to most people and can be difficult to understand compared to traditional e-commerce. The company wanted to improve the user experience for new users and help educate users on why they should sign up and use our service. 

After reviewing the current homepage, conducting a brief user testing session and reading online feedback from community members, I identified 3 common concerns:

(1) Important information is lower on the page and should be higher

(2) Overwhelming experience when first coming to the site as well as verbose language

(3) AI art feels out of place or doesn't align with customers values 

With these concerns in mind, I decided the best approach would be to restructure and redesign each component of the homepage to provide a step by step, easy to follow hierarchy for new users to quickly learn everything they need to know and offer multiple points the user can begin their journey. 

I created a basic sitemap for the homepage and outlined the order of content blocks and where they should link to. This allowed me to plan what the next step should logically be for a user if they feel comfortable moving on to find their item. 

Once the site map had been completed, I moved on to ideation and sketching out each element and how they might be displayed on the site. I used this to try and solve display issues for mobile and desktop, plan out interactions, and review an idea before the wireframing process.

I created both a mobile and desktop wireframe giving myself the opportunity to share my ideas with the team and discuss how content should be displayed on the site. This was the perfect time to answer questions like what should and shouldn't turn into to a carousel on mobile, how many stores should be shown, etc. 

Finally, I moved on to the high fidelity mock up stage before discussing implementation with the frontend developer. This mock up relies more on whitespace to space out elements on the page and provide breathing room to allow the user to focus on each block individually.

The AI Art has been replaced with small and showcases of products to give the user a better sense of what they can purchase. 

From our research we believe that users come to our site, with a store, or interest in mind firs. The site now presents information in a logically top to bottom manner (Service > Store > Category > Item).

Currently this new page is in the testing phase and so far has received positive feedback and engagement appears to be in the right direction. This project was interesting to work on as it was about optimizing content via its structure and presentation, rather than new feature development. 

We plan to expand our findings to other pages on the site to constantly iterate and improve.