The Company

The Cookie People is a local, family-run cookie shop based in Raleigh North Carolina. They have been committed to baking cookies for the Raleigh area since 2008 and sell their cookies at farmer’s markets and in their shop in downtown Raleigh.

My Process

1. Empathize

Validate by going to the user: I conducted 3 contextual inquiries to see if the assumptions above were pain points users were actually experiencing. The data can be summed up in one quote:

My suspicions were confirmed! At this point I knew that I would need to no only add e-commerce to their website but also do a redesign.

Competitive Analysis

I wanted to research the online presence of other successful competitors and see if I could find some common practices that seemed to be working for them. The competitors I chose to research were Milk Bar, Crumbl Cookies, Susie Cakes, and Tiff’s Treats – yum! I completed a task analysis of buying cookies online with two goals in mind:

1.     To see how competitors laid out their user flow of a customer buying cookies.

2.     Understand the different features on the website.

My key insights were:

1.     They all have same day delivery

2.     They all allow you to choose the date and time of delivery

3.     They all have an option to pay online and pickup.

Let’s take it one step further.

Comparative Analysis

I gained some great insights from the competitive analysis but I felt that I needed to conduct a comparative analysis of brands that had success in e-commerce. The brands I focused on were Kylie Cosmetics, Corksicle, Béis Luggage, and Buck Mason. All of these brands, particularly Kyle Cosmetics, have experienced massive success in the e-commerce space. I completed the same task analysis on purchasing a product online with similar goals:

1.     To see how laid out their user flow of a customer purchasing a product.

2.     If there were any common features or e-commerce best practices.

My key insights were:

1.     The checkout cart appears as an overlay on the right hand side of the screen.

2.     The form design was essentially identical across all platforms.

3.     All had express checkout options.

It struck me that all of the brands I used for the competitive analysis had quite different user flows while the brands I used for the comparative analysis had such similar user flows. This immediately made me think of the usability heuristic “recognition rather than recall” and I knew that I wanted to create a flow that user’s would immediate recognize so that the checkout process was seamless.

Time to go back to the user!

I conducted 5 remote user interviews with the goal of understanding individuals online shopping habits. I wanted to understand what motives them to buy online, what keeps them coming back to a certain website, what device they are typically purchasing on, and who they are making the purchase for.

2. Define

Now that I had completed all of my research it was time to synthesize my data. I used an affinity map to extract key insights. Then I developed a user persona and problem statement.

My key insights from the affinity map were that people want:

1.     An easy to navigate website

2.     A simple checkout process

3.     Fast delivery

With the problem defined (yay!) we head into the next phase.

3. Ideate

This exercise was helpful in identifying layouts and features that were working for other companies. I gained inspiration from each of these and developed my final sketches.

I then took my sketches digital and created mid-fidelity wireframes in Sketch.

4. Prototype

I used InVision to create a medium fidelity prototype. Check out my prototype here. This is the second version of my prototype based off of user testing. I will go over the results below.

5. Validate

I conducted 3 usability tests and gave each participant the task of ordering 1/2 cookies. My goal was to identify potential pain points that could be improved in future iterations.

Insight 1:

Problem: “I wouldn't use the filter function for so few products. I only care about the most popular."

Solution: Removed the filter function and automatically sorted the the cookies by “Most Popular”.

Insight 2:

Problem: "Reviews should be more visible."

Solution: Decreased the size of the “You Might Also Like” section and brought the reviews higher up on the page.

Insight 3:

Problem: "I want to choose my deliver date and time. Also, pickup is important".

Solution: Removed “Anything you forgot” section and added in the option to select delivery date/time or pickup.

Next Steps

For my next steps I would like to:

1. Design an option for a user to create an account.

2. Iterate on the “Review Order” form so that user’s could update the information directly in the form.

3. Do a card sort to explore potential cookie filtering options.