The quilting industry is doing a terrible job of attracting the under 45 sewists and many still behave like they did in the 1970-80's. Additionally, there has been a renewed interest in hand made crafts as people are looking for ways to personalize their belongings.

New Kid on the Quilting Block will be designed to teach skill building quilting techniques for new quilters.

We have observed that most sites aren’t designed to step users through the quilting process - step by step - which often leads to more questions for new quilters.

We launched a survey and completed one-on-one interviews with people who are currently quilters or who are interested in learning to quilt to understand their challenges in getting started and learn what they wished they could get help with.

A busy stay-at-home mom who suddenly finds that she has more time on her hands now that her daughter is in school full time. Renee is sentimental and has boxes of her daughters outfits that she doesn’t want to get rid of, but is running out of room to store. Renee talks to her friend who shows her a quilt she made with her favorite baby clothes. Renee is intrigued by the idea - because it reuses the clothes she has in a meaningful way and it will be something that she can share with her daughter when she is older. She finds NKQB and it delighted at the approach they take on teaching a beginner!

How might we interactively guide, encourage, and support new quilters learning the craft while minimizing frustration in the process, clearly defining the stages of the process, and highlighting a standard starting point?

The problem as we see it is that most quilting sites are simply a repository of information and very few - if any - guide a new quilter through the quilting process.

So our question is how do we build a site that interactively guides, encourages and supports new quilters learning the craft while minimizing the frustration that so many new quilters encounter. This frustration causes many people to give up before they even get started.

As we started sketching and thinking about our design, we kept these points in mind:

The logo should immediately let people know that this is a site for quilting so we incorporated the logo into a spool of thread and kept the font choices simple and easy to read. We wanted to make the site someplace people wanted to visit so we wanted the voice to be friendly, simple and a ittle bit fun!

Here is the high-fidelity prototype we landed on. When we tested this with users- we specifically picked non-quilters to see if they felt that they got the information that they needed to feel confident in starting a project.

The first thing users will come across the website will be the hero, the first impression of the website. As interesting as the name of the website sounds, we wanted to give an exciting experience through the hero with kind guidance to the beginners on where to go when they visit our website and provide brief information.

Testing and feedback from both quilters and non-quilters helped us develop an easy to use site. Communication, sharing, and leveraging our individual strengths were keys to our success.