Duration
2-week design sprint
Toolbox
Figma, Adobe Photoshop, Miro, Notion & Google Suite
Role & Responsibilities
UX Lead — Oversaw research, strategy & ideation processes
Team
Felicia Tay (Product Manager), Hong Qiao En (Project Manager) & Shanice Woo (UI Designer)
Baking a New Good
Flour Power, 2023
“What makes an e-commerce store stand out from its competitors in a highly competitive and saturated baked goods market?”
That is the question we tried to answer for Flour Power in 2 weeks. The social enterprise bakery has been serving up baked goods since 2016, and provides equal opportunities to people with special needs and other conditions.
Currently, Flour Power is looking to focus its core brand identity on the quality of its products and services, and wishes to de-emphasize its status as a social enterprise that may require charitable support or donations.
01. Problem
In the crowded and competitive e-commerce market for baked goods, Flour Power must revamp its virtual storefront to stand out.
The current website suffers from several issues, including missing content on various pages, a confusing global navigation system, poor typography, and products located behind a separate payment gateway.
To succeed, Flour Power's new e-commerce website must showcase its baked goods in an attractive and appealing manner, while ensuring that the checkout process is streamlined and efficient.
03. Results
From our usability tests with 15 individuals, we saw a significant improvement in the website's usability, with a 37.75 point increase (from 43.75 to 81.50) on the System Usability Scale (SUS)*.
We also achieved a 59.14% time-on-task reduction for the checkout process (from 168 seconds to 68.4 seconds).
Given the results from this initial round of usability tests, we can hypothesize that this redesigned website will allow Flour Power to build a stronger brand identity, improve its customer experiences and increase conversion rates.
*Note: SUS is a tool to quickly measure usability performance for websites. A score above 80.3 represents the top 10th percentile for website usability.
02. Action
My team and I undertook the entire design thinking process — from thorough research and ideation, to prototyping and user testing our Minimum Viable Product (MVP).
A critical aspect of our work involved restructuring the content of the website. We removed redundant pages and introduced a new 'Bulk Order' page to cater to corporate and wedding gifters.
After creating the MVP prototype, we collaborated with software engineers to transform our design into a fully-functional website.
Role & Responsibilities
I oversaw our team's research strategy, which involved designing interview questions for stakeholders and users, and synthesizing information into insights. Additionally, I guided our ideation phase and created solutions (including features and content) to address our client's business goals and users' needs.
Besides leading the early UX stages of this project, I also collaborated closely with my teammates to wireframe, prototype, and test our redesigned website.
Understanding the Problem Space
To better understand Flour Power as a business, its target consumer groups and the e-commerce market for baked goods and cakes (unfortunately, cookies aren't really my thing), we conducted the following research tasks in a week.
- Audit of Flour Power's current website
- Site visit to Flour Power's kitchen
- Stakeholder interviews with Flour Power's CEO and resident bakers
- Competitive analysis of online baked goods retailers
- Comparative analysis of F&B social enterprises
- 14 user interviews (with small-quantity buyers or bulk order buyers)
(Key information from the user personas we created)
Turning Insights into Solutions
After synthesizing our user insights and research findings, we identified 2 key issues that our user personas face when purchasing baked goods from e-commerce stores, whether they are making small-quantity purchases or placing bulk orders.
With these problem statements in mind, we went about designing solutions.
What I've Learnt
Eleven days felt really short for the amount of work we put into this project! All in all, we spoke to 14 individuals for our user research, designed the entire website, and held 2 rounds of usability tests with another 15 individuals 🤯.
Looking back, we could have approached things differently. Apart from scaling back on the number of interviewees, my teammates and I could have worked on multiple tasks simultaneously. After all, design thinking is a non-linear and iterative process!
Work does not end after a design sprint! What counts is the actual impact. Despite completing this design sprint, my team and I are looking to help Flour Power migrate our designs onto a more convenient and accessible e-commerce platform like WooCommerce or Shopify.
Good visuals are also essential for any F&B e-commerce store. Drawing on my past work experience as a photographer, I'm volunteering to set up a product photography system for Flour Power.
Thank you for reading! If you would like to find out more about this project, please drop me an email or connect with me on LinkedIn ✌️
And also a special shoutout to Pablo Stanley for creating the beautiful humaaans library ❤️