E-Commerce Case Study

Alexandra Linortner
Nov 5 · 4 min read

The project for my second week at the Iron Hack UI & UX bootcamp was all about e-commerce. In a group of 3 we had to choose a local business, do some research and find the most important User Flow to be visualized in Mid-fi Wireframes.

The bakery

For almost 60 years bakery “Ladewig” has been selling their traditionally baked goods in the heart of Berlin at Schlesisches Tor.
The family run business is well established in the neighborhood. They are also trying to reach new customers with an online cake order service.

Research Phase

Our group went there on a Saturday morning to enjoy a delicious breakfast and watch the daily business. Our observation showed us that the bakery runs well. It was surprising to see that the customer base is pretty young. In fact 60 % were under the age of 35.

So the bakery is already super popular in the neighborhood but during our visit we also found out there are hardly any online cake orders.

left: customer age in years | right: Competitive Analysis for online cake delivery options in Berlin

The Competitive Analysis showed us that the bakery already has a good spot on the matrix as the other online delivery companies don’t offer the same traditional variety of cakes.

So there is a young target group who usually likes to order things online and hardly any competitors for online cake delivery. Why is the online shop not running?

We went through the whole online cake order process and found
the answers:

  • First of all the cake order option is hidden under the navigation menu “baking accessories”. So it is pretty hard to find.
  • The cake ordering process is pretty long and in the end you have to wait for the bakery to call you back for the details.
  • There is no online payment option.

So to sum it up: The webshop is pretty antiquated and the process is definitely not what the young target group would expect. In conclusion this might lead to many drop offs.

So HOW MIGHT WE modernize the website to attract new customers from all across Berlin?

New User Flow

The observation and interviews during the research phase gave us some insight on the target group which we turned into a persona. This helped us find the most important user flow.

Primary Persona: Philipp

Philipp is 30 years old and lives in the neighborhood of bakery Ladewig. As a father of two with a full-time job he has a busy schedule.

Right now he is sitting in front of his computer trying to get a cake for his sons birthday party. He wants to plan in advance and needs a convenient solution because he has no time to pick up a cake somewhere.
He remembers the traditional bakery his friends told him about and searches for:

>>bakery Ladewig cake delivery << which brings him to the entry page of the our User Flow:

Paper Prototypes

The next step was to visualize this User Flow with a quickly sketched Paper Prototype. These allowed us to do user testing before going into detail with the design.

One of many interesting findings was that the users wanted to see the delivery fee before clicking on the “check out button”.

Mid-fi Wireframes

After some test iterations with our Paper Prototype we decided to go on to the final step of our challenge: the Mid-fi Wireframes.

Find our Invision prototype here!

Learnings

  • A Kanban Trello board should be the best friend of every designer! It helped keeping the group updated about all the steps and made us master the challenge within one week.
  • Finding a simple, best practice check out process is not as easy as you might think. It took us hours browsing through different webshops to get inspiration.
  • Overthinking can be a huge blocker in the process. Sometimes it can be good to talk to someone who is not a team member because they will get you “down to earth” again. :)

Big thank you to my team mates: Charlotte Clutson and Julia M. Perera

Alexandra Linortner

Written by

Freelance art directrice for product design, packaging design and graphic design — alex-design.at. Co-founder of glitterandtechno.com. UX/UI design student

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