Case Study — E-Commerce project
Toasted Bagelry & Deli

Intro
Over the second week at IronHack we had a group project again. Our group challenge was to redesign the website for a local business. We chose to work with Toasted Bagelry & Deli, which is located on 8th Street, just like a block away from the IronHack Building. The two Egyptian brothers Islam and Khaled moved to the US in 2001 and started working in bakeries throughout New York and New Jersey. Realizing their experience can help them bring their delicious bagels and deli to Miami they opened the exposed-brick-covered Toasted Bagelry & Deli in Brickell where they do things the old way with kosher malt, flour, conditioner, and filtered water producing pristine bagels.
Pre-Determined Goals
In this project, we’re focusing our efforts on delivering great shopping experiences for the end-users. Our main goal was to improve the E-commerce side of the business by redesigning its official website.
Setting the Scope

We planned to begin with the secondary research, so we could better understand the current situation and get more familiar with Toasted Bagelry & Deli customers. Google and Yelp was a great source of information in this case. We found a lot of different kinds of reviews about their experience with Toasted Bagelry & Deli. Here are some of these reviews:



These reviews helped us to see some of the main problems that are creating a negative experience for these customers. As you see, most of these reviews are related to the delivery process. These people are unhappy with the time and quality of the Toasted Bagelry & Deli’s delivery service. Next, we went to their official website, where you can place an online order for delivery or pick up at the store. For delivery, they use third-party companies like UberEats or Grubhub.
Research and Discovery
Then we decided to go to Toasted and interview the owner, but unfortunately, we were not able to meet them at that time. One of the employes was on lunch break so she agreed to answer our questions, so here are some interesting quotes:
It’s a mixture…a lot of people from out of town, a lot of business people that work around here and a lot of families too…
It’s pretty user friendly.You can order the food through the website and you can also customize your order there…
We have in-house delivery service as well as third partly deliveries like GrubHub, Uber Eats, Postmates…
On Saturdays and Sundays, we are very busy. So sometimes it takes a little bit longer for the food to come, but thats should be it…
We try to use fresh ingredients and most of our stuff isorganic. Also, you can customize pretty much everything…
Now it was time to look into the business side of the problems. We had enough information about our Bagelry, so we used a feature analysis to compare it with the other similar businesses.

With this information, we were able to observe all the advantages and disadvantages that our Bagelry has. Thus, we also used a Market positioning chart to determine the current market position of the store and find out where there is a blue ocean in the market.

Next, we built the affinity map, which allowed us to define our business's potential users' habits, demographics as well as their pains and gains. After collecting all this data we created a user persona and their journey map, this helped us to understand the mental models of our users.


AHA moment
We realized that the official Toasted Bagelry & Deli’s website currently has a lot of gaps. Most of the customers who had interaction with it were not satisfied. We created a sitemap, which led us to a few conclusions.

First of all, the home page menu is hard to read and it has similar categories, which is very confusing. For example, in* the menu, you can choose “Order catering” or just “Catering” and both of them take you to the same page Which does make any sense…This makes the user to hesitate for a moment, in order to figure out what is the difference between the two. When users try to look at the menu, they are redirected to a different website. From my experience, this reduces the customer’s trust significantly. Some menu items have no photo, which creates obstacles for users trying to select food. Thus, there was a lot of room for improvement.
SOLUTION
Therefore, it was clear that the Toasted Bagelry & Deli website requires radical and immediate changes. For a better understanding of what exact adjustments we would make we filled up a Value Proposition Canvas

In the ideation process, we used the “how might we” technique to guide our ideation, and then applied a MoSCoW method to determine what ideas would comprise our MVP and what can be the next step in the future.


MVP STATEMENT
Our MVP is a website that will allow users to get clear product information, checkout with ease using one-click and start from auto-fill capabilities, and view the progress of preparation and delivery accurately
Before drawing wireframes we generated a user flow chart, which shows a perfect happy path, that our user takes when trying to place the order online.

Using a user flow we determined the structure of the innovated website, an approximate number of the screens and the features. We then created a Lo-FI prototype:







Next, we conducted usability testing. From 14 users: 28.6%(4) had a direct success, 64.3%(9) had in-direct success and 7.1%(1) couldn't finalize testing. The biggest problem that testers faced was not having access to the “add to cart” button on the menu screen. Also, we didn't have a face ID screen, which is supposed to pop-up when you click the face-ID option. So when the testers tried to proceed with an apple pay, they were a little confused. After making some changes we created MId-Fi prototypes:

CONCLUSION
Nowadays the E-commerce site is a crucial part of any business. When a customer is entering a website to place their order, he or she may need to find a lot of different kinds of information. And that's when we have to make them feel satisfied, right at the beginning of their journey. Businesses that don't understand or simply ignore this is definitely missing huge potential on the market. By creating an easy and comfortable tool for online shopping, any business can significantly increase its revenue and bring a huge amount of new customers.
