The Story: Flavors
FLAVORS is the second concept project that I worked on in General Assembly. The project was to design a new website for Williams-Sonoma. The objective was to introduce cooking classes either online or in-store which also includes an online interactive kitchen and grocery checklist. My role was to develop a 20 screen state clickable prototype made with Sketch & InVision. I spent two full weeks working on this project.
The Process
I started this project by reading through Williams-Sonoma’s company history and mission. I ran through their sales performance just to understand their business prospective as well. I also learned about their commitment in Corporate Responsibility. I know that this will be very instrumental at a later stage. Having gained these information which I obtained mainly online, I then decided to work on my screener interview. I wanted to understand peoples interest in food and their appreciation and willingness to learn to cook. I sent these screeners to about 25 people internationally followed by phone conversations. I managed to get a hold of 17 solid candidates who were available to commit to my interviews and I was pleased that this would give me some insights to what I was looking for.
Since I had already prepared my interviews simultaneously with my screener interviews, I sent them out immediately as soon as I got a reply from my screeners. I sent my questions out through email and whatsapp. I followed up with to run through the questions immediately but I only managed to speak to eight participants due to the various time zones as well as their busy schedule.
Nevertheless, by the same night I had already compiled all my interviews. I was working on this to help me create a persona. Next, I had to extract all these information and I created an affinity diagramming. It was clear she was an Eurasian, which is half European an half Asian parentage which led me to create Jennifer Crum as my persona. A well travelled person, with an extensive cultural experience and background. She lives in Sydney and she was expecting her future in laws to visit her for the first time in December. She also wanted to impress them with her Mediterranean cooking skills. I managed to identify her goals and pain points and her need to master her cooking skills in the shortest time was crucial for her to be able to share her passion for food with her loved ones.
The Challenge
I started working on a competitive and comparative analysis simultaneously. I did this comparison with Williams-Sonoma and Sur La Table. I then ran a heuristic evaluation on Williams-Sonoma site and I was able to identify the crucial points that was necessary for my new development. My ultimate challenge was to reduce all the cluster from the existing Williams-Sonoma site. I found it to be overwhelming for a novice user and some functions were not successfully functioning to the needs. I also noticed a lot of inconsistency and redundancy on their site. I knew that by all means, I had to steer away from creating something that could be as compact and full of contents as the parent site itself.
The Revelation
Through my interviews, I compiled the fact that most individuals were interested in taking up courses online where they could view it at their own pace rather than to attend any in a particular place or time. I found this to be very positive to my development. It helped me streamline the details on the site and I was able to focus on one angle of the course that were being offered. This also means that it will be less clustered when it comes to a full fledge site. Instead, I drew my attention on creating an introduction page for the Chefs and their signature dishes. This also helped me navigate through their ingredients and tools for for preparing the dish. I worked on my concept map and my user flow. I kept my focus on focus Jennifer’s ease in using the site.
The Vision
Flavors was created so that Jennifer could gain confidence in her ability to cook. For Jennifer to gain access to these courses within her busy schedule. It was for her to be able have the right utensils for food preparation and have access to the right ingredients with ease, ultimately building her confidence in her cooking skills in the shortest time. I wanted to create a personalized experience for Jennifer. The objective was for her to get to know the chefs in the most personalized manner.
The focused was on developing five primary functions for the site.
1. Chefs- to get to know the chefs and their signature dishes.
2. Select Course- to be able to select the desired course.
3. Marketplace- to be able to purchase ingredients for the various dishes offered.
4. Utensils- to be able to purchase cookware for the various dishes offered.
5. Culinary World- the ability to share the recipes, blogs, images among other other enthusiasts.
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The whole site was kept very light, clean, soft and healthy feel. The choice of colors, fonts were very important and I wanted it to reflect the Mediterranean theme. The minimalistic approach best suits this website although it was in huge contrast with its parent company, but it is aligned with its branding and corporate goals.
The Oversight
I had to rearrange the structure again after I ran three usability tests with my paper prototype. These were the details that I had iterated after my tests.
1. Chefs were introduced as Global Button instead of a pop up window previously.
2. Skill selector was removed from a drop down local navigation.
3. Price was introduced as an individual item
4. Ability to select individual dishes through various chefs.
I found this to be really helpful. It helped me gained insights on the website. In fact, this helped me tidy up the unnecessary buttons that I had initially placed, eg; skills selector.
The Refinement
I would like to rework on the layout of the page. I would like to remove the big branding as soon as you navigate from the home screen. This should give Jennifer a smooth ease in navigating without having to scroll each page the moment she switch pages. I would also like try to change the orientation of the images and try a different layout. It could help ease through the navigation. I would also like to explore the Culinary World Global button and fine tune that section as well.
