Ironhack Project 2: E-Commerce Case Study

Project Brief and a bit about Berries In The Grove

When first briefed about this week’s project and that we would be working with real stakeholders to create a better user experience for their website, I was really excited to get started. My partner for this week was Nicholas Llobell and we kicked things off really well. It didn’t take us long to decide on a business to work on, as Nicholas is family friends with the owner of Berries In The Grove, Rob Snider.

Berries in the Grove started as a juice & smoothie bar in an old house on 27th Avenue, right at the entrance to Coconut Grove.

As Rob stated, “Berries is a charming neighborhood restaurant serving some the freshest food in South Florida. Creating great memories from fresh ingredients since 2000, Berries is the perfect place for friends and family to meet and eat!”

First Steps

While we wanted to interview Rob early on in the process, we realized that sometimes we don’t have control over these types of things and would have to work with him to find a time. This resulted in an interview with him set for Tuesday night. Now, keep in mind, we only had the week to work on this project so we had to be proactive and focus on what was available to us.

Because of this, we started off by checking out the website ourselves and jotting down things that stood out to us, good and bad. With a list compiled, we already had a good idea of the website’s functionality as well as where it can improve. To further confirm our initial thoughts, we went ahead and performed four usability tests to get a better understanding of how actual users interact with the website. For these usability tests, we took note and observed users as they completed a couple scenario tasks while we encouraged them to think aloud. This resulted in a ton of great feedback and pain points that backed up some of our initial findings. Once this was finished, we turned our attention to the next step of our process: conducting competitive SWOT (Strength, Weaknesses, Opportunities, and Threats) analyses.

Competitive Analysis (SWOT)

As a team, we figured out who Berries’ direct competitors are — Flanigan’s, Paulo Luigi, and Sadelle’s — and went through each of their websites to take note of their strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats. These findings allowed us to see the bigger picture of elements that work, and those that don’t work, along with where improvements can be made for each website.

Berries SWOT Analysis

Interview Notes

Fortunately, we made a lot of good progress before it was time to interview Rob. Through interviewing him, the manager, and one of the hosts of Berries, we learned even more about the company, how they view themselves vs. competitors, and how they see their website. While some of the answers they provided us conflicted with each other, we had a couple of key takeaways:

• Rob only checks the website when he is made aware of issues with it
• The manager claims to check the website weekly but also wasn’t aware of any issues
• They want to add more accessibility features in the future
• Flanigan’s is their biggest competitor
• Berries’ website hasn’t been updated since 2020
• The host mentioned experiencing usability issues throughout their time on website

Sitemaps

To get a visual understanding of Berries’ website as a whole, we then created two sitemaps — one that goes over the current website and another that is a potential updated version of the website. Based on the feedback we received, we learned that users view pages such as “Events” and “Reservations” as very important, so we decided to move these two options from the “More” dropdown to be included in the top navigation bar. While there can certainly be a lot of nice additions to the current website, we decided to focus on the reservations portion of it.

Current Sitemap and Updated Sitemap for Berries

User Flow

With the reservation process at the forefront of our focus, we started off by creating a user story that would help guide us as we made our user flow. Our user story was, “As a user looking to schedule dinner for next weekend, I want to make a reservation, so I can have a table ready at a set time.” We then made our user flow to showcase what the user’s happy path will look like as they go to make a reservation using the revamped website. We were directly inspired by the way OpenTable makes reservations a quick and easy process, so we wanted to add this feature to the Reservations page rather than redirecting users elsewhere.

User Flow for making a reservation

Prototype

Once the user flow was finished, we were ready to get started on our prototype. Using Figma, we created a mid-fi prototype of an updated version of Berries’ website with the new reservation system. We believe that implementing a third-party service like OpenTable would greatly benefit the accessibility and usability for Berries and may result in getting them more customers, which will ultimately get them more business.

You check out the prototype here! Feel free to leave some feedback in the comments, as I would love to hear what you think!

Conclusion

To wrap up this case study, I’d like to go over somethings that I learned and what the hypothetical next steps could look like.

Things We Learned

• Be more descriptive with terminology during interview questions and don’t assume that others know exactly what you’re talking about. For example, the owner asked what we meant by “e-commerce” and what our angle for it was.
• Businesses may not always be up-to-date with their websites, so there is plenty of opportunities for us as designers.
  COVID changing the world as we know it is an example.
• Performing usability tests provides a ton of valuable feedback that interviews alone may not provide.
• It’s important to showcase our main process and the steps along the way of our journey, rather than getting sidetracked and bogged down on trying to fit in every single methodology. We wanted to share our story with you guys instead of making this a super formal pitch.

Hypothetical Next Steps

• More usability tests on the prototype
• Gather and discuss feedback
• Gather more insight through card sorting
• Make iterations based on gathered feedback
• Adding more accessibility features for users who are impaired
• Make other pages more appealing by adding more relevant information and features

Working on this project with a real stakeholder was an awesome experience, and I’m very proud of what we were able to achieve in just one week. I look forward to next week’s task, and I hope that you have enjoyed this week’s journey!