These days, you can go just about anywhere online and buy cheap, mass produced adult novelty toys. But in these toys is lurking a dark secret: Mass produced toys are a completely unregulated market. As such, many are made from potentially dangerous, non-body-safe polymers and plastics.

Northern fantasy toys, a small Toronto-Based artist who makes body-safe, 100% pure silicone fantasy themed toys, was created as a direct response to the current state of the unregulated, mass-produced sex toy market.

This company, and their users, deserve a website that can enhance the experience of purchasing these unique pieces of functional art. Knowing this, I set off on a journey to discover what their users would need, and to imagine what that site might look like.

Research

The start of that journey, I knew, had to be with the gathering of intformation. So i put out a survey to my social media followers, asking a number of very open ended questions, which gave me a plethora of anonymous, qualitative information about people’s needs when it comes to insertable sex toys.

Interviews were not conducted at this point, as the assumption was that people would be less embarrassed speaking about their sexual needs in an anonymous and text based method. Later attempts at interviews confirmed this hypothesis.

In this survey, I asked a number of general questions about what users prefer when it comes to sex toys, and then I followed it up with presenting specific toys from Northern Fantasy's catalogue.

When I began looking at and sorting other survey responses by how they responded to the Aventus, two distinct categories of users began to emerge , with some overlapping needs between them.

From these two categories, I was able to create two personas.

From this point, I proceeded to do some open card sorts. I offered it originally as a way to see what categories users would like to filter by, intending to use the categories they identified as the basis for my own sorting system, but something interesting happened.

Two of the users I'd given the card sorting activity to, both of whom I could identify as being more towards the vanilla side of the spectrum, created categories with names like "ow!" and "Why" and "No". Generally, the toys that fell into those categories were ones that were quite a bit larger than typical, but also ones that were generally more strongly textured and with unusual shapes to them.

This gave an idea: a convenient scale with which to judge how likely Sable would be to find a given design offputting, based on how far it deviates from the general shape and features of a run-of-the-mill average penis-shaped dildo.

I called this scale the Niche Appeal Factor, or NAF.

Now, if we place the toys presented in the survey onto this continuum, and cross-check it with survey results, then we can begin to identify the point at which the vanilla users in the survey began to express fear and trepidation, rather than excitement.

In this case, the tentacle shaped one was where discomfort began to show. Therefore, the area between that and the beginning of the continuum is labeled The Sable Zone.

Visual Design

Moving from low to high fidelity wireframes, I ran into a number of unexpected issues. First, the product images were inconsistently lit. This meant that I would need to have some kind of border around them in order to give them a more consistent contrast against the white of the background. To solve this, I created a border using the same rainbow that my page dividers used.

These rainbow borders are fun, but they're not the most practical in terms of visual clarity. In hindsight, I might have chosen a simpler approach, in a single color, or perhaps each row a different color of the rainbow, so as to continue to incorporate the rainbow into the theme without overwhelming the user with too much visual information.

Designing the mobile view of the site posed its own unique challenges. The filters section of the product listing page was too long and bulky for the mobile design. To solve this, I took half the tags and aligned them in an alternating position on the page.

This way, mobile users have access to all of the same the filter options available on desktop, without sacrificing the visual balance of the page.

Feedback and Next Steps

During critique, I received a ton of extremely valuable feedback. One that stood out in particular, was that my homepage had very little to distinguish it from a product listing page, an assessment which I agreed with as soon as it was brought to my attention.

Left is the page as I presented it on the day of my critique. On right, my first try at iterating on that feedback.

In future iterations, I would like to further redesign the home page to feel more like a landing page, in order to provide more information about what makes Northern Fantasy Toys special.

I would also like to provide a point on that landing page for beginners to split off properly, onto a dedicated new users informational page in the style of bad dragon's, while keeping it generally friendlier for those beginners by keeping toys with a higher NAF out of view.