Rochester Brainery
The Rochester Brainery is a community classroom and event space located in Rochester’s Neighborhood of the Arts.
Originally the Rochester Brainery website started on WordPress, but due to the superior way Shopify handles e-commerce transactions, the peace of mind she had with Shopify’s security, and the ease of use to adding new products, events, and classes, the owner requested that everything could be migrated over.
web design + development, graphic design, UX/UI, Shopify
development
The original design of the Shopify site focused on organization, for at the time, Shopify was a bit more limited in what could be done. As time passed, the design and organization of the site has changed due to Shopify being more flexible and from feedback from users and staff members. It was my job, during these shifts, to make sure the site style and graphics reflected the changes in direction. I also developed each new Shopify theme, the first two being custom built, and this most recent one being a theme that was heavily modified.
The original designer of the logo provided some supporting brand graphics also utilized for print materials, which I then used to design each of the Shopify themes around.
Any additional website graphics needed were then created by me to supplement the overall design.
usability
Besides the migration, we needed to tackle the challenge of providing a solid user flow as well as making it easy to manage and navigate the large number of classes being provided under a more constrained platform.
Each time the design changed, the site was evaluated to improve user interaction and organization based on feedback by students. When organization changes were made, we had a group of beta testers review the site to make sure their experience was improved and that there was no confusion on how to navigate the site.
the digital
experience
After a lot of testing, it was discovered that there was a huge desire to have varied ways to search and filter classes due to the shear amount that were available to them. We also implemented various ways to make sure users easily knew when classes were sold out at a glance as well as making sure classes were not overbooked. Simple graphic elements and type treatments were also utilized to provide visual cues and content separation.
