The Frye Company's Harness Collection Microsite 

(Worked completed while a student at General Assembly)

Assignment : Create a microsite for a retail business within Ponce City Market

Research : Upon selecting Frye I visited their Store to get a better feel for the culture of Frye and the products that they sale. It was clear that while they sale many types of leather shoes, their focus is on boots. Among the boots the Harness style stood out and the more that I looked around the store, the more that I would see expressions of the harness all around the store. Later in my online research I would confirm that among all their styles, the Harness Boot is what Frye is best known for.

Along with researching Frye itself, I looked into their competitors in the boot market along with All Saints a company known primarily for their leather jackets, who have a similar cool persona like Frye Boots. 

In doing this I found that Frye had distinguished themselves by being an old school boot maker who has a history of quality, but is also forward leaning and stylish. The other historical brands have focused more on producing work boots that are excellent in quality but lack any kind of style. Frye's competitors in the fashion world tend to be primarily clothing brands who produce boots for style but can't match the quality nor history that comes with Frye Boots. Frye is the only company that can compete on both levels. 

Once I decided that my microsite would focus on Frye's most famous collection, The Harness, I printed out all the styles and their colors and I had people sort them to better understand how people would naturally filter the products when the came to the site.

Prior to the card sorting that I did with numerous people I had assumed that after splitting the men's, women's and children's that people would next filter by color. This assumption proved to be wrong as a clear majority of people where more concerned about the cut of the boot and that the leather color came only after this filter.

Sketching and Iteration : With a better understanding for how people would shop for the boots I began the sketching portion trying to understand what exactly the site might look like.

Along with my sketching I began working on the user flows to understand all the steps along the way. 

Testing : Working through these stages I was able to move forward with creating a clickable prototype and then start putting that into user's hands to find out what was working and what wasn't. 

With each test I was able to refine and tighten things up and finally create my final low-fi prototype.