New Roots Organics

New Roots Organics is a subscription-based produce delivery service. Their site needs improvement and I took a research-based approach that will lead to increased subscription rates.

Scope (student project)

UX Research (2 weeks with one teammate)

Information Architecture (2 weeks - solo)

Visual Design (2 weeks - solo)

Tools

Adobe Illustrator & Photoshop, Xd
Optimal Workshop (card sorting)

The Challenge

Final visual re-design of the how our service works page.

The Problem

Current Site Doesn't Cut the Mustard

When a new customer signs up for their service, New Roots sends a PDF explaining how to use their website.

Wouldn’t it be peachy if they didn’t need instructions on how to use their site?

PDF's sent to new customers instructing them on how to navigate the New Roots website.

Research - Survey and Interviews

Ingredients for Success

Based on our research we concluded that New Roots should do the following:

Promote how easy it is to customize an order.
Let people try before they buy - people love free samples!
Follow current trends - offer a recipe based box to help ensure food doesn’t go to waste.

From these findings we also created a persona, Conscious Claire.

Claire is based on the data gathered from a survey of 45 people. Her values and behaviors are based on 7 interview participants who currently use or previously used a service like New Roots Organics.

Information Architecture

Structure and Labels are the Bread and Butter

Structure: One opportunity for improving the navigation is to surface key information that is somewhat hidden on the current site.

Bringing this back to the research this means addressing customer values and desires, their needs around customization and ensuring the decision to subscribe is reached easily.

First, I took an inventory of the site and then created a domain model to examine how the entities on the site relate to each other.

Domain Model - related objects (connected with curved lines) can be connected through secondary or contextual navigation.

Labels: The current site labeling is confusing. Using competitive research and the results of the domain model, I set out to create new labels.

Before creating new labels I tested the existing ones with an open card sort. The level of agreement between participants was very low. For instance, 6 of the cards were sorted into 14 different categories.

In hindsight a hybrid or closed card sort would have improved the results and perhaps given me a better sense of the participants' mental models.

For testing the new labels I decided on a hybrid card sort. The results were much clearer and gave me a good idea of the labels that might still need some work, like Recipes and Produce Storage Tips.

Site Map - The revised site structure was informed by the second card sort as well as the domain model exercise.

Produce Storage Tips and Recipes were two of the most difficult cards to place. Since storage tips vary by product, these can be accessed via particular product pages rather than the main nav.

Since recipes are not the main function of this site they don't need to be front and center. They can be accessed via product pages, the search function or a link in the footer of each page.