Disney Books

DISNEYBOOKS.COM REVAMPED

Duration: 3 week
Role: UX Designer

Disney Publishing was getting a new name and they needed a new website to showcase to younger parents.

HOLISTIC REVIEW

We took a look at what we had and collaborated with our business partners to breakdown the different sections of the site to redesign.

The primary age-filtering navigation was located beneath the hero section. Combined with the navigation colors, it was challenging to distinguish it as a separate element. It almost looked as if it were part of the hero section.

Visually, this is acceptable. It appears to be part of the same experience within the Disney books website. However, the problem was that the left module redirected users away from the Disney books experience to another site. We needed a better way to distinguish that.

The third section here is likely the least useful, facing the same issue as the previous module. The video section redirects you away from the site's experience.

Out of all the sections, this category section closely resembles the design systems of many competitor websites, such as Barnes and Noble, and even some e-commerce comparison sites like Amazon. With a few minor tweaks, it will look modern and updated.

DESIGNING

Using the existing CMS modules from Disney.com and the current structure of the Disney Books site, we only had to make minor updates as part of the holistic review, along with one major update to the hero section.

The hero section of the site has always been a production request from the DisneyBooks team. This often led to a lot of back and forth during reviews. They will need a way to automate the hero section, allowing them to spend less time in review and more time marketing the overall DisneyBooks brand.

The B hero was a subtle upgrade from the original, with very minor changes like the carousel arrows being pulled out of the hero. However, we again encountered the issue of custom production heroes, which we are trying to avoid. One thing that caught my attention with this carousel is that data showed carousels aren't as effective in their click-through rates by the time you reach the 3rd to 5th slides. This is a recurring theme across all disney.com sites.

With the Hero CMS module in place, we decided to pull what would normally be in a carousel into a secondary column featuring two other books.

This is the mobile version of the module, with subcopy removed for more concise mobile viewing.

TIDYING UP

As we progressed in our design conversations with our business partners, we decided to remove sections 2 and 3 from the original holistic review. The current redesign serves two purposes:

Getting rid of links that drove away from disneybooks.com traffic.

The same applies to the 'watch video' section. By removing it, we ensure traffic stays within disneybooks.com. The 'latest release' section can be showcased within the hero's three features: one main and two secondary. If needed, additional 'latest release' books can be placed in the book discovery section.

FINAL TOUCHES

The book browsing section was where I practiced my visual design skills. From the beginning, the visual hierarchy with the colors was so disorganized that I didn't know where to look. I'm sure this impacted user engagement on the old site.

PROJECT TAKEAWAYS

Collaborating with the business partner made this project exceptionally seamless. We both had a clear understanding of what worked and what didn't with the older site. Together, we introduced innovative solutions to enhance and future-proof the site. Take a look here! Some UI exploration that was not mention on this page can be found here.

What I would improve on next is the navigation:

The navigation is limited by age. What if users want to explore all the various IPs that the Walt Disney Company offers? Before the project concluded, I provided this mock-up as a potential enhancement for the navigation design.