Summary
The Next Level Games brick and mortar store wanted to expand into the online market for selling games, and Magic the Gathering singles and sealed product.
They needed a site that could both sell their product and keep a separate inventory for specific online sales prices.
They also wanted the site to be a gathering place for local players to engage with the shop and each other in between visits to the physical store. Lastly they wanted to become a primary source of articles for and by Magic the Gathering players and pros.
Proposal
As a table top gamer this project was both exciting and familiar to me. I went into it with a lot of big ideas for the design and approach.
The largest challenge on the project was making sure the products where easy to search, sort and find. Magic the Gathering has a very long history and as such an enormous catalog of product. I created several different types of views for products so folks could at a glance see what was in stock, out of stock, and what was on the buy list (a large part of these types of stores).
I gave the site a robust search feature, that allowed both quick searches for specific items and more robust searches for less specific items. Making sure all results were returned in the same format as they appeared in the store normally for a consistent and pleasant shopping experience.
I created an inventory system inside of ExpressionEngine CMS for the store owner to track, maintain and update the online inventory separately from the physical store inventory. This was integrated with a robust commerce add on for ExpressionEngine, which automatically created product entries on the site for each in stock and for sale item in the inventory, including a threshold for the buy list, which would automatically mark an item as needed, and add it to the site’s buy list.
During the process I also created a new logo and brand for the company, that was turned into a large sign for the physical store’s facade, as well as being prominently displayed on the website, and team jerseys.
Practice
For this project, I practiced Brand Design, Illustration, UX Design (research, wireframes, and user journeys), UI Design, HTML/CSS/Javascript and ExpressionEngine CMS integration. Additionally I managed the project from discovery to launch.
