Field Notes

“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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.