Field Notes

How might we strengthen the relationship and loyalty of customers to a physical goods brand in a digital space?

Ultra slim executive summary

Who?
Just me. This was a solo school project.

When?
February, 2017— One month turn around
‍
What?
‍Responsive website for uploading photos of your used Field Notes notebooks

Why?
To strengthen ties to the brand; allow customers to be a part of a collective story. Additionally encourages collecting and using notebooks.
Final product

“Regular people working really hard”

Field Notes as a brand values nostalgia, and honoring the past. It's all about patina. The more used a notebook, the more it's been loved.

The patina tells a story. Field Notes is about little moments of joy, delight, and surprise. It's a celebration of honest, everyday people.

Field Notes was inspired specifically by old dime novels and memo books handed out by seed companies as advertisements. They have a page on their website that highlights Aaron Draplin's collection of these books. This is where my idea came from.
Seed notebooks
From the Field Notes website
My field notes book!

Early explorations

This project was structured like a real client project. We were responding to a brief, and in that brief it asked that we bring some early style frames to get client buy-in.

This is what I started with; an augmented version of the Field Notes website with a showcase of customer's notebooks.
Style frame early exploration 1Style frame early exploration 2

Information Architecture

After the first round of style frames, I made an IA map to define the structure of the site. Since this was pre-research, it was based on assumptions and educated guesses.
Information architecture

Wireframes and paper prototyping

I did several rounds of iteration wireframing, some on paper, some digitally. I ran these little prototypes by some peers to discover early usability issues and to validate the concept.
Snap, look at these wireframes

Quantitative survey: 174 responses

Goal of the Survey
My goal was to gauge interest, determine key motivators, demotivators, awareness around the brand, and get some cool ideas for topics/uses of Field Notes to feature.

Sourcing Participants
I posted this survey on Reddit in several different Subreddits. It was the top post of the /r/FieldNuts page for about two weeks straight, giving me a lot of traffic.

Findings
The sheer amount of data let me see at a macro scale whether people would be at all interested in this, and if so, what they would be looking for. A lot of their responses were invaluable to me and the process of this project.
No one reads graphs on design portfolios tbh

Wrapping it up

This project allowed me to get pretty close to a comprehensive quantitative study of a brand's customer base. Namely, because the fans of Field Notes are very passionate and the platforms I used to distribute the survey were effective.

Working with that data, and with a group of super fans that cared so much about the product was a huge source of inspiration. There's just something about these notebooks.
Mobile browsing experience

Voice user interface design and development for Alexa Skill

Force Facts — Personal Project

Created January—March 2017
Designing for the invisible.
See the full case study ⤏