Project Overview

Redesigned the responsive website of De Spelfanaat, a local board-game store in Mechelen. The store’s real value is expert advice, community, and shared play, but the website only showed basic information.

Competitive Analysis

Most competitors focus on large product grids, filters, price sorting, and text-heavy product pages. These patterns make purchasing easy, but they don’t help users understand or choose a game.

Feature Comparaison

Brand Analysis

Market Positioning Map

Opportunity: Position De Spelfanaat around trust, guidance, and in-store experience instead of price.

Research

Stakeholder: After the competitive analysis, we conducted a stakeholder interview. The owner described the store as a community space for learning and personal recommendations, which was not visible on the website.

Business goal: Make the website drive store visits.

Users: We interviewed 5 board-game players who regularly research games online. They reported that online stock often feels unreliable, understanding a game can take hours, and in-store advice is faster and more trustworthy.

Insight: users want clarity and trust, not more content.

Affinity diagram

After conducting our user interviews, we created an affinity diagram to organize our findings.

This affinity diagram groups our interview insights into behaviors, pain points, and user needs.

From this, three key themes stood out:
people rely on friends and staff when choosing games, community plays a central role in how they discover and enjoy games, and while they love visiting the store, slow checkout and missing stock quickly become frustrating.

Define

From our affinity mapping we created our primary persona, Alex, an introverted gamer who researches extensively and prefers trusted human advice over algorithmic recommendations.

His journey showed that finding and understanding a game requires significant time and effort, leading to hesitation and decision fatigue.

Problem statement

After defining our user persona and mapping Alex’s journey, we formulated the following problem statement:

Introverted gamers lack clear and reliable game information online, which creates uncertainty and makes decision-making stressful.

Ideate

After defining the problem statement, we translated our insights into “How might we” questions to explore solution directions.

We focused on helping users understand games faster, highlighting the human side of the store, and reducing information overload.
Using Lean UX and MoSCoW, we prioritized clear game information, trusted reviews, real stock visibility, and simple decision helpers.

MVP: A responsive website that builds confidence and encourages store visits.

Site map and User flow

After ideation, we defined the site map and user flow.
We designed a journey from Discover → Learn → Trust → Visit, allowing users to explore games, understand them quickly, and always see how to reach the store.

Low fidelity/ concept testing

After defining the site map and user flow, We created low-fidelity wireframes and conducted user testing with 5 participants.

Findings:
The homepage structure was easy to understand, but store information needed to be more visible, and tutorials were essential for understanding games.We created low-fidelity wireframes and conducted user testing with 5 participants.

Mid fidelity/ Test results

Based on the low-fidelity results, we created mid-fidelity wireframes and conducted another round of testing with 5 users.

Insights:
Some labels were unclear, pages felt too text-heavy, and CTAs needed a stronger hierarchy. We simplified the content and emphasized the physical store throughout the flow.

Visual Design

Visual Competitive Analysis

After mid-fidelity testing, we moved into visual design. Competitors focus on clear e-commerce and product grids but lack community and storytelling — a key opportunity for De Spelfanaat.

We defined the brand attributes as friendly, trustworthy, playful, accessible, and community-driven, and translated this into a mood board with warm colors, real people playing, and a cozy atmosphere.

The visual system uses Fredoka for headings, Nunito Sans for body text, and a warm yellow, orange, and green palette to create a calm, welcoming feel.

Mood board

High Fidelity / Outcome

After defining the visual system, we designed the high-fidelity solution.

The final experience features a community-first homepage, game pages with clear details (difficulty, time, players), reviews and short videos, visible events throughout the site, and a fully responsive layout.

Outcome
Users can understand a game in minutes, feel confident, and are guided toward visiting the store — reinforcing De Spelfanaat’s real value: community.