I had the opportunity to work on the redesign website of Virginia Harp Center, a store and business I am familiar with from my career as a harpist. I started this redesign project by first evaluating the overall functioning of Virginia Harp Center's website and by interviewing a group of harpists to understand their needs.

Once I did my initial functioning assessment of the website, interviewed harpists and performed a comparative and competitive analysis, the most clear pain point for users was clear: a need to search and buy harp scores in a more simple and streamlined process.

Since I am a harpist myself, one of the biggest challenges I had in this project was to continuously check for my own biases in identifying and understanding harpists's needs (this particular challenge was one of the reasons I took this project!). How did I address my bias? By doing a constant zoom in and zoom out of the problem to keep all perspectives in check, and most importantly, by listening to the users.

Harpists need to buy sheet music often because they use it for teaching and performing. Most harpists search for their sheet music using a search bar and filtering options. Another need harpists have is the option to see sample pages of the sheet music before purchasing.

I decided to address harpists's needs by redesigning some features in Virginia Harp Center's website. The main redesign was in the information architecture of the website; I included a sheet music tab on the main navigation bar. I also placed a search bar on the landing page. Other features I included are the use of filters and sample pages to view.

After performing two rounds of usability testings, the redesign website of Virginia Harp Center proved to be a positive experience for harpists that want to either search for sheet music quickly or prefer to use a more specific filtering option.

This was a solo project, so I performed every part of this project, from research to design and all the steps in between.