Eataly.com Redesign
| Product: Prototype of site redesign with improved task flow
| My Role: UX Researcher and Designer
| Timeframe: 2 Weeks
Project Scope
Zagat calls it a “high temple of la dolce vita” and Forbes calls it “the Italian mega-food destination” — Eataly is renowned for its incredible Italian experience. With e-commerce giants like Amazon reshaping the retail landscape, retailers need to focus their efforts beyond their phsyical brick and mortar storefronts. Online shopping is on the rise and “brands that hope to remain viable must be able to compete across all channels.”¹ Eataly is looking to redesign their e-commerce site to better reflect their brand and to have a stronger presence in the e-commerce market.
Initial Problem Statement
With such a wide array of offerings, Eataly’s in-store experience would be difficult to emulate through their e-commerce channel.
How might we help users get the full experience through eataly.com without overwhelming them?
Research Phase
In two weeks, I had to create a working prototype of Eataly’s site redesign. For the first week, I conducted research with UX designer Bronte Liu to analyze Eataly’s business, its customer base, and its website.

To learn about Eataly’s current customers, we visited the Flatiron store to conduct contextual inquiries and field studies. We gathered that customers of Eataly…
- Value quality and is willing to pay more for it
- Trust the quality of products at Eataly
- Appreciate the Italian culture and enjoy Italian cuisine
- Enjoy cooking and experimenting in the kitchen
- Shop at Eataly with item(s) in mind
- Come for their gifting needs
- Like to travel the world
“I rather get produce that can last the next day than stuff at like Trader Joe’s that would go bad quickly.”
“I’m just going to go to Dean & Deluca. Their truffle salt packaging looks nicer.”
“I like to buy the fresh stuff when I’m shopping here.”

Based on our in-store findings, Eataly’s personas were updated. The primary persona is the couple Chester & Maggie original liked to cook healthy meals for each other, but they changed to a couple who like to cook based on their travels. They often waste time trying to find specialty ingredients. Chelsea, the secondary persona, used to be a teacher who also enjoyed cooking. From our onsite observation, we noticed gifting was an important aspect of Eataly. Chelsea was updated to be a sales manager who frequently bought gifts for her clients. We focused our redesign on our primary persona who mainly uses their iMac and MacBooks, so the site’s redesign is for the desktop rather than mobile.
We also needed to understand how Eataly’s current site was performing. Though heuristic analyses, card sorting and usability testing, we were able to see what was and wasn’t appealing about the site.

We conducted a thorough heuristic analyses on Eataly and its competitor Dean & Deluca for comparison. Eataly is very content heavy and they do not showcase them in the best way. All the different pop colors they use can also be distracting. In comparison, Dean & Deluca scored a lot of 5 out of 5s across the board for its clean design that is easy to navigate around. Below you can see both of their current homepages. Eataly’s homepage appears cluttered with info compared to Dean & Deluca, especially at the global header and main navigation.


We did a series of card sorting — both open and closed card sorting, to learn how users would organize existing items on the site. In open card sorts, users tend to generalize all foods into one main category. Categories were often broken down to 2 levels deep, 3 levels max. Users had trouble sorting items under “Beauty & Home” and “Fresh,” indicating confusions of how the site is currently categorized.
I ran 4 usability tests on the desktop site and 3 on the mobile. The results were similar across both devices. Everyone encountered problems navigating the site. Some were so frustrated that they said they would leave the site if they weren’t testing the site for me. That is clearly a major flaw with the site. Eataly’s site must be losing a lot of potential customers due to poor UX.
Based on all our research findings, we the initial problem statement was revisited. It was indeed validated, since users didn’t showcase the same experience between being in stores and visiting their website. The prominent problem with the site is its confusing shopping experience.
Revised Problem Statement
How might we make an intuitive, streamlined experience that engages visitors of eataly.com?
Design Phase
For the next week, I set out to design a solution for Eataly’s site.

I started off with streamlining the sitemap and task flow by consolidating info and excess steps.



Next I worked on incorporating the design solutions into mid-fidelity wireframes and high-fidelity mock-ups.





To see if the changes I implemented really helped to improve the shopping experience, I ran 6 user tests to measure the success of them.

Test Findings
Delightful Points
- 6 out of 6 users successfully performed the task
- 5 out of 6 users found the process easy and straightforward
“I like how smooth the whole process was.”
Pain Points
- 3 out of 6 users didn’t intuit truffle olive oil to be under the “food” category
- 1 out of 6 users didn’t find the checkout process to be trustworthy
- 4 out of 6 users didn’t notice the filter menu
“The checkout process was too fast. Where’s my order summary?”
Bonus Findings
- Users liked the simplified homepage being less content heavy
- Some pointed out that they liked that the colors are refined
Next Steps
Based on the overall positive response from the desktop updates, we can also start creating a responsive version for the mobile site after improving on the pain points from the usability tests from the desktop prototype. I am sure that as we continue to make the site more intuitive and streamlined, visitors will enjoy their experience on eataly’s site which will help increase e-commerce sales.
Retrospect
Redesigning Eataly’s e-commerce site was able to teach me a lot about translating information from one platform to another. In this case, it was research from Eataly’s phyiscal store to their online store. Even though visiting an online store would never be the same experience as visiting the physical store (and vice versa), customers seek the same thing upon their visits. They want to be engaged, to easily navigate to find what they’re looking for and to have the same level of service across both channels. Just like physical shops work hard on their interiors and displays to “wow” their vistors to stay and shop, the design of an online shop needs to impress the viewers both asthetically and functionally to keep them on the site.

