Tech Deck Website Redesign

Tech Deck Website Redesign & Virtual Skate Community Challenge

Tech Deck is one of the most recognizable fingerboard brands in the world, loved by skateboard enthusiasts, collectors, and hobbyists. This individual academic project explores how the website can become more than an online store by pairing an improved shopping experience with a community-driven digital platform.

The Challenge

How can Tech Deck transform its website from a simple product catalogue into an engaging platform that encourages users to interact, compete, and return regularly? The existing experience offered limited reasons to revisit, no meaningful community interaction, and opportunities to improve product discovery, navigation, and content hierarchy.

Objectives

From a business perspective, the redesign aimed to increase engagement, improve retention, and support future sales. For users, it aimed to create simpler shopping, easier navigation, a stronger sense of community, and meaningful recognition for participation.

Understanding the Users

The research combined surveys, user interviews, competitive analysis, heuristic evaluation, persona development, and journey mapping. Interviews with people familiar with Tech Deck and miniature collectibles explored expectations, motivations, and pain points. The research consistently pointed to easier navigation, better product browsing, more reasons to revisit, a community experience, and recognition for skills.

Persona & journey

Jason represents a community-minded enthusiast who wants to discover products, participate in the culture, and be recognized for their skills. The existing journey ended after purchase: discover, browse, purchase, leave. The proposed journey adds Join Challenge, Vote, Leaderboard, and Come Back—giving people a clear reason to return.

Opportunity Areas

The opportunity was to improve the shopping experience, increase engagement, build community, and reward participation. Together, these directions could evolve Tech Deck from an eCommerce website into an experience users actively return to.

Introducing Virtual Skate Community Challenge

The central concept is a weekly fingerboard competition where users submit tricks, vote for community favourites, and compete for exclusive rewards. It creates a recurring loop between commerce, participation, recognition, and community.

Feature breakdown

The experience includes a homepage challenge banner, a dedicated challenge page, entry submission, community voting, a scannable leaderboard, winner announcements, and email rewards. Each touchpoint is designed to make participation feel visible, easy, and rewarding.

Design Process & Testing

The design progressed from sketches to wireframes, information architecture, high-fidelity interfaces, and an interactive prototype. Usability testing with five participants across three tasks informed two rounds of refinement. Feedback led to a clearer Vote banner, renaming the submission CTA to Join Challenge, highlighting the Top 3 on the leaderboard, and adding breadcrumbs for easier navigation.

Expected Impact

As a concept, this project is framed around expected impact rather than measured results. Recurring challenges could encourage repeat visits, build a stronger community around the brand, create touchpoints beyond purchasing, expand opportunities for user-generated content, and support long-term customer retention.

Reflection & Next Steps

This project reinforced that successful experiences go beyond visually appealing interfaces. Feedback influenced key decisions, from renaming calls to action and improving navigation to redesigning the leaderboard. Future opportunities include user profiles, achievement badges, AR trick detection, a mobile app, social sharing, seasonal challenges, and team battles. By combining eCommerce with community-driven challenges, Tech Deck can become a digital destination where enthusiasts shop, compete, and celebrate their passion together.