Ceres
Due to Covid lockdowns in Melbourne, there was an increase of people visiting the Ceres website, however there was a large number of users who would not proceed past the cart stage and leave during the check out stage or earlier.
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The client wanted to understand why and be presented with a solution that was user (customer) centred.
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Team Members: Chris Piper and Hang Le
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Background
CERES Fair Food (Ceres) is a social enterprise that delivers organic groceries to households across Melbourne and provides employment opportunities and career pathways for people seeking asylum and new migrants.
Image from sourced from Flaticon, created by Freepik
Usability Testing: Investigating the Existing Website
To investigate why users would not proceed past the check out stage, the team conducted usability testing on the existing website to see where the pain points were on both the mobile and desktop versions of the website.
User Research
We wanted to investigate what the current market is, who the current users were and who the competitors are and what made them successful.
Research Synthesis
After conducting our research, we collated all the data and commenced affinity mapping to create our persona.
User (Customer) Centred Design
Following on from crafting our persona, we brainstormed a number of problem statements and HMWS (How Might We Statements) and discussed each.
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‘Kelly needs a way to buy fresh produce because she wants to maintain the health of her family.’
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How might we communicate to Kelly that her purchase is fresh?
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But what does 'fresh' mean for Kelly? I, personally, think 'fresh' is frozen as soon as it is picked, but that is definitely not how Kelly feels.
Empathising with Kelly, we discussed this at length and agreed upon the following:
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Not frozen, not ‘packaged’
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Picked and delivered to her quickly
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Not sitting in a warehouse
Ideation
After agreeing on what 'fresh' meant for Kelly, I facilitated a design workshop where we used the 'Crazy 8' method to sketch up a number of ideas and potential layouts over an hour. We conducted a team vote to decide on which we believe best suited Kelly, our persona.
Information Architecture
Because our research indicated that our customers had difficulty finding what they during shopping, I set up an open card sorting exercise on UX Metrics and our team sent it to eight users for sorting.
Taskflow and Minimum Viable Product
Before creating a wireflow, we had to understand how we wanted our customers to go from the home page to checkout and then product purchase.
To do this, we created our ideal task flow and discussed what items we needed to prioritise by creating a Minimum Viable Product (MVP) chart.
Wireframes and Prototypes
Because our research indicated that our customers had difficulty finding what they during shopping, I set up an open card sorting exercise on UX Metrics and our team sent it to eight users for sorting.
After we drafted our wireframes for both mobile and desktop on Figma, we conducted user testing on 5 users (as per recommended by the Nielson Norman Group)
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Want to see the mid-fidelity prototype I created for this project?
Summary and Next Steps
So why were customers not proceeding past cart checkout? It was due to a combination of small frustrations that lead to a large issue.
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1. Inability to find what they wanted in the locations they expected them to
2. Requiring an account to complete their purchase
3. Not knowing whether what would be delivered would be fresh
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How did we address the issue?
1. Inability to find what they wanted in the locations they expected them to.
2. Requiring an account to complete their purchase.
3. Not knowing whether what would be delivered would be fresh.
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Next Steps
1. To develop metrics for testing and defining success of these changes.
2. To further test and iterate using a high fidelity prototype .
Reflection and Lessons Learnt
Following the standard UX design process may be a good start to find out what their user (Kelly) wants, but ultimately, the business goal was the improvement of sales which was improved by researching and making changes to the site flow and information architecture.
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This highlighted the need to make business goals the forefront of any future projects. I took this lesson and implemented it on to the next project, which was the Red Cross Lifeblood Project.
