COMPETITOR RESEARCH

To understand what needs to be delivered for a home decor website, I've carried out extensive competitor research on what other home decor websites look like and what they had in common. I also wanted to get some inspiration on how I wanted to portray Noiir Squared London to give it a luxury feel.

The following common features in the below competitors websites:

• The use of white space

• Sans serif fonts consistently, occasional decorative font as a title

• The use of the colour black and white, to represent sleek, modern and give luxury feel

• Not too colourful, lets colours of interiors/homeware speak for itself

• Square displays for layouts of products and rectangular buttons used throughout

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Competitors: www.stevensonshome.co.uk, www.luxdeco.com, www.houseology.com, www.livertylondon.com, www.tobiasoliverinterior.com

LOW & MID-FIDELITY WIREFRAMES
Now that I had established the information architecture of the app, I was ready to sketch the low-fidelity wireframes by hand and turn them into black and white mid-fidelity wireframes using Sketch using the mobile-first approach:

HIGH FIDELITY WIREFRAMES & STYLE GUIDE

To create the high-fidelity wireframes, I needed to made a decision on: the visual design principles/trends, colours, imagery, typography, shapes & icons.

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I first created a mood board which is a collection of luxury home decor/interior inspiration and design pieces that established NOIIR's mood. The founder wanted a clean and minimal yet stylish design so I wanted to remain consistent with the colours black and white. TI made the following design decisions:

After putting all of my design decisions together, I set up the SEO search engine for NOIIR SQUARED LONDON in order for it to be searchable on Google. I also set up the shipping, payments system and created some social media content for the founder to use on the launch day. 
 

PROJECT LEARNINGS & TAKEAWAYS
One of the challenges in this project was trying not to look similar to other existing home decor websites and standing out from the competition with minimal products. As the business is a start up, there was only a handful of products that could be displayed and advertised. However I have learned how to showcase the products without repeating them and displaying them in an attractive way by including quotes and customer images that fall in line with the business's ideals.  

I have spoken to the founder who is planning to release more products this year from which she can supply me with more images and client feedback so I can include a customer reviews page on the site.