Key Points:

• The major takeaway from my research was a strong appreciation for staff recommendations. The current Village Books site has no genre structure and limited ability to search for books generally instead of a specific book. Staff Recommendations are what users generally engage with, and it's actually extremely popular with readers.
• My design is informed by the desire to have community events, staff recommendations, and then other bestsellers on display. Users appreciated seeing a curated list of books that have been vouched for.
• Check-Out strongly deviated from modern expectations. There were open text areas, checkboxes to sort through, and a singular long, scrolling page to work with. I made a point of updating the process to be the multi-step setup users are familiar with now.
• Color choices on the main page felt very dated to users. There wasn't much feeling of modern design, and it added to the sense of clutter and confusion the poor site mapping created. Updating to a clean white background and keeping the signature tan color on the header and footer made the site look more modern.
• Product pages as is, did not lead anywhere and were extremely limited. Following again with modern convention, I added space for reviews, a link to an author page to find related books, and space for similar reads.
• A tree test helped clean up the wild number of redundant links, and clean up some of the more interesting questions around where the radio show should go, how to break down the staff recommendations vs genres, and how to clean up unnecessary clicks that made the original site so cumbersome.