I usually start with interviewing the stakeholder, despite of the creative brief. Especially when there has been longer period of time between the brief and a project start, the questions help me to get the most up-to-date information, avoid disappointments later and increaces my changes to create the best possible product for the client. Here some of the questions I included:

1. Who are your users? How do you help them?
2. What are your values, vision, mission?
3. What are your USPs?
4. What kind of research has already been done?
5. Are there any technological constrains?
6. What are the deadlines for the projects?

I did a research looking for similar products and compared 5 websites of which 4 of them are strong.

For qualitative Analysis I interviewed total 9 participants; persons who love to read books, passive readers and fans of scandianvian lifestyle. Interviews were conducted with video & phone calls by using zoom and whatsapp platforms. Through interviews I gathered some insights about their challenges & motivations.  Here some of the questions I included:

1. How often do you read books?
2. Which is your favorite book and why?
3. How do you buy your books? If online, which platform?
4. What do you like the most about that website?
5. Any challenges while using that website?
6. Do you keep the books as a collection or do you sell it after you read it?

Here are a few examples of responses:

I created two different personas based on the target audience and all the information gathered by the research.

I used Empathy Mapping method to get deeper understanding about users behaviours and decisions.

Based on the user research I created a Customer journey map to better understand the crucial pain points, challenges, mindset and overall journey which buying a book. 

In order to empathize with Hugo and Julia further, I created user flows in order to better understand their overall journey interacting with the website – taking a step into their thoughts and the different decisions they would make while trying to complete tasks in different scenarios.

Focusing on the prioritized solutions, I created a site map to help define the overall structure of the content on Cozy publishing’s website in a way that would be logical and easy to navigate for the users.

Taking what I’ve learned throughout my process to this point, I started to make decisions on how the content on Cozy Publishing’s website would be organized based on the project goals we want to meet and user flows as a guide. Through paper sketches allowed me to quickly explore several concepts for the website layout. Then I tested these with 5 participants to validate whether these solutions addresses both the user and business needs.

Now that we have refined the overall structure of our website based on what we learned from testing, the question now was – what will it look like? Here is Cozy Publishing´s style guide.

Main headers are in Monserrat Medium and body text will be Arial Regular. The Goal was to convey contemporary, friendly, minimalistic vibes with these fonts.