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Esther is a housewife who owns a home bakery store in San Jose, California. She started her home business in 2015 and has established a very good reputation with word-of-mouth. Due to the recent Covid-19 situation, she realized the importance of having a business’s website because most people nowadays prefer to shop and pay online.
In response to the recent Covid-19 issues, the main focus is to help Esther’s home bakery business to create a new branding and her very first responsive website so her business can sustain in response to the new normal.
The goal for this project is to :
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To better understand the home bakery business market in general and consumers’ concerns and behaviors, we want to learn:
Three research methods are chosen to conduct the user research:
After an in-depth competitor research, the findings are:
In order to find out the current demand for home bakeries, doing a secondary research is needed. Although there are no direct reports of demand for home bakeries, I have found reports from reliable resources suggesting that baked-products in general are and will be in high demands.
The bakery industry will increase worldwide by a projected US $147 Billion due to the recent Covid-19 crisis. This is mainly due to a lot of people being unemployed and feeling insecure about the future and fear of isolation. The only way to help themselves feel better is their strong emotional connection to food since comfort foods offer consumers something soothing, familiar and nostalgic.
The products that make up the bakery market are as follows:
In addition, deliveries have surged since the shutdown. Thus, offering delivery service to consumers is something that Esther will need to consider in response to the current situation.
On the other hand, there are also reports suggesting that since small bakeries are impossible to beat big and established retail bakeries, thus, small bakeries can differentiate themselves by offering healthy and specialty products. For example, baked products with healthy substitutes for ingredients such as gluten-free, low-carbohydrate, whole grain, organic, paleo diet, and vegan are in great demand.
Specialty products such as ethic products. The report says that 7 in 10 chefs told the National Restaurant Association that ethnic-inspired foods would be the top food trend in 2019.
Here are the valuable findings derived from the 1:1 interviews:
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This Similarity Matrix shows how users categorize information with the given cards and the similarity percentage of each card categorized by all users.
All participants categorized the 30 cards based on what they think in the most direct and intuitive way. Although each participant may have some slightly different cognitions in the provided baked-products’ names, the category names they came out with are all from the corresponding product category. For example,
Thus, this suggests that we can categorize our products at the most basic level as this will take care of users of all levels.
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Based on the researches, sitemap, task flows, and persona, I created these initial wireframes to reflect the main user journeys. Below are the responsive designs’ margins and spacings used for Desktop, Tablet, and Mobile screens:
The ideas behind the design is to create a website that is easy to use which, at the same time, promotes usability and learnability for users. Hence, I have reused elements and patterns throughout all the pages for easy navigation so users can focus on their browsing and shopping. Below is showing only main task pages:
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Esther’s business doest no have a logo and the business name has always been her name. She does not like that and wants a rebranding. Thus, she needs help with designing her business name and logo. She wants something that represents here which also conveys the feelings of Friendly, Fresh, Delicious, Homemade, and Exquisite. Hence, I have brainstormed a few logo concepts for Esther to choose from. Here are the concepts:
Esther has finally decided to choose her business name as Baby Baker and she likes the wordmark design. The reasons behind the design:
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I began by referring back to my testing notes and grouped every note based on similarity to create this Affinity Map. In order to easily identify each participant, they all have their own Post-it note color. By having this Affinity map, I get a bigger and clearer picture of which iterations I need to prioritize and what can be next.
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Based on the usability testing report, I have created a prioritized iterations list:
Below are the prioritized iterations and explanations on how I iterated them:
*The UI design and prototype have been refined to align with my current skill set (2023).
This project seemed to be easy and straightforward at first. However, it had its difficulty. The most challenging phase was designing the branding for Esther. Esther had a lot of great ideas. But due to having too much ideas and not having a narrow scope, it made it so difficult to choose which direction to focus on. Fortunately, after a few discussions with Esther and lots of questions asked, I finally helped Esther narrow down those ideas and got a clearer scope. This is a great experience as I realize that designing is not always about having no constraints but it is the constraints that make a good design.
Led in conducting UX research from scratch, redesigning all of the apps and the website previously poorly developed by a third-party company, and overseeing the entire development process after handing off designs to developers.
Identified users’ current pain points, needs, and goals for event planning, and solved their problems by creating and designing an all-in-one event planning mobile app for the Android OS.
Made Doordash a fully one-stop platform by seamlessly adding in-demand features such as 'Favorite restaurants and orders', 'Leave a review for both restaurants and drivers', and 'Save orders' into Doordash’s iOS app.
Identified users’ current pain points, needs, and goals for time traveling, and solved their problems by creating and designing responsive layouts for desktop, tablet, and mobile screens.
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