Village Baking Co. Website Redesign

Their current website lacks responsive web design, there are some unreliable buttons, outdated information, and design that is not accessible. There are opportunities to improve the design of the website to improve the experience of the users and improve business outcomes.

Redesign the Village Baking Co. website to improve navigation and usability.

Before interviewing users, my team and I sent out a screener survey to gather insight. We wanted to target people who like to treat themselves frequently by going to a bakery or coffee shop. After the survey, I conducted 2 in-person user interviews and all together as a team, we had a total of 6 interviews. One of the team members also interviewed one of the stakeholders.

Objectives

Understand their perception of the brand and Village Baking Co.

Understand the experience with the website

Identify pain points and opportunities for improvement

Identify what users want from the website

Because this was a website redesign, I performed a heuristic evaluation to further investigate what we needed to improve for the website. After doing the evaluation, I annotated the website to get a better picture of what iterations we needed to make.

The original website does pass the color accessibility test but it fails at the font choices as it was difficult to read. This test was also supported separately in the user insights that stated the font was difficult to read because of the size and type.

To redesign the website so that it targets all of the pain points we discovered, we started by reworking the style kit so that all of the fonts and color scheme are accessible for the user as well as updating the images and menu items on the homepage. In addition, we will add in a responsive menu, and a feature to inform users of any updates from the bakery.

To better understand the flow of the website, we created a user flow of the current page. From there we created categories of each navigation to conduct a card sorting activity. As a team we sorted it the cards on our own to get a better idea of how the users would categorize each subsection. Afterwards we had 3 different people do the same. Once we had an idea of how the redesigned website should work, I directed two team members to create the site map.

Once the project leader returned, we all worked on the Mid-Fi Prototype together. Each person taking on a different page to create. Despite the roles being dispersed, the mid-fi prototype came together flawlessly. After the prototype was created, we conducted 6 usability testings.

Through this we found that:

Footer content should be distributed in the space

Multiple screens for locations for easier readabiltiy

Social media icons as links

One important finding that we noted was that there was a mix of emotions towards the menu page. We had half of the users state that they loved the usage of all the images for the menu while the other half felt overwhelmed by the amount of information thrown at them. So as a result we agreed on doing an A/B Testing where one prototype showcased a dropdown menu of just text.

Through this project we had to work with stakeholders and local users, this has proved to be very valuable in my journey as a UX Designer because I was able to learn that users always know best. Despite what the stakeholders want, the data showed that with the changes we made, the overall user experience was improved.

I imagine that if granted the time and resources, the website can be improved to have:

An FAQ page that includes information about allergens and dietary needs

An updated about this business page because the company had been reaquired recently

An updated menu page that allows user to hover over text to view the images

An online ordering system