PNWX.com
Pacific North West X-Ray is a medical company that sells a wide range of medical equipment and accessories through their website catalog. The problem with this company is that it is very difficult to order things from them on their website. There is no print catalog or online ordering, so all of your ordering has to be done through a fax number, phone order, or by mail which is inconvenient in today's age.
The aim for this project is to completely redesign the website from the ground up for a fresh restart. The background of the website has that early webpage look with harsh gradient coloring that distracts the viewers attention. The logo is GIF file that is also constantly distracting. Though, the most inconvenient part of this website is the fact that every product page's organization is different. Photos are placed wherever and the text surrounding the photos doesn't have any layout given for hierarchy. You are constantly bouncing back and forth from different sections trying to figure out which product is which. There are just too many paint points to count.
The Concept
Early on with the concept planning, it was evident that the website lacked organization and hierarchy. Layout and organization was the first priority of my early concepts. While designing the new layout and organization, it needed to have hierarchy on every product page. Every product page needed to have a dynamic feel with all of the elements being placed the same.
The next step in the concept was choosing the colors. The colors I ended up choosing were the colors that made the website feel like a medical company. A lot of medical companies have a very prestigious look and feel to their websites and buildings. I decided to pick grayscale colors for this website's design because of the medical background.
The Process
I started out with basic research on other medical websites to explore layout and color possibilities at a medical company website. I also needed a way to group products together in collections because the current website lacked on grouping things together. Then I started out with paper prototyping to quickly view the entire website's layout redesign that I had thought of. I found a couple of problems early on in my design process, but I was able to quickly solve them.
After thinking through all of the user's paint points from the current website, I was ready to implement my layout into a low-fidelity wireframe. Alongside the wireframing process, I had redone the menu and streamlined it to current standards. The last thing I completed for this project was a high-fidelity wireframe with a preview the home page and a dynamic product page for all of the company's products.
