Project background, users and research findings

Viallotti is a family restaurant baking cakes, pies, muffins and donuts whose target customer is too busy to prepare a delicious desert. Viallotti strives to bake all the cakes and pies they can; their speciality is wedding cake. Their target customers are young parents and women between 28 – 45 years who find they lack the time or skills necessary to bake something. For those people Viallotti provides easy to follow recipes on their blog page.

The problem

The target customers of Vialloti are typically women who can’t bake or want to learn more about baking. Many of their customers organize cake parties and actually customers don’t have an opportunity to use website or application for ordering that much cakes and learn new recipes.

The goal

My goal was to design a cake website with blog page and ordering page so users could easily and effortlessly order anything from restaurant’s menu within few clicks.

My role

My name is Matyas. I grew up in Prague, on the outskirts of town. Incidentally, my first hobby was drawing. I’ve always loved drawing but I wasn’t good at it. I didn’t have the graphic design side which could improve the overall look of anything I did on paper. 

I plan to continue discovering new things in my career as a UX designer and a website developer. As a designer, my goal is to meet users’ needs with engaging, simple designs; that’s what I like.. My dream is to make design so simple and easy to understand for every user of all types and backgrounds and still make it engaging.

My role in this project as a UX designer was to take ownership of the app’s design, from concept to delivery. My responsibilities included: foundational planning and research, user research, wireframing, prototyping, usability testing, iteration, and the creation of a final high-fidelity prototype.

Challenges

The biggest challenge for me was composition and finding proper sizes of particular elements on the website. Also interviewing was very tiring. 

Project duration

March 2021 to April 2021

Research

I conducted interviews with target users, then distilled what I learned into actionable steps. I used the insights I discovered to identify pain points my users were experiencing. I entered my research with a set of assumptions, but those assumptions changed as I spoke to real people who deal with the topic I was researching.

The most important pain points we uncovered were:
● The website doesn’t have a contact page
● Most users struggle to use the filter for sorting items when ordering items
● Most users have some problems going through all the steps to card payment
● Users want the option to filter by size of the item
● Users had problems finding text in blog page legible
● Users find navigation menu ambiguous

The information Iuncovered helped merealize I needed to do more to make ordering easy and engaging for busy users. Once I realized this, I had a clearer idea of how to move forward.

Usability study

Study type: Unmoderated usability study

Location: Europe, remote (each participant went through the usability study in their own home)

Participants: Five participants, each completing the study individually

Length: Each session was 5-10 minutes, based on a list of prompts

Results: Users had difficulty ordering items easily. Older participants or participants with visual disabilities had difficulty reading the text and label text in the app. Users were also unsure of how works shopping cart. Some users had difficulty easily finish ordering.

Initial design using 8 one-minute sketches

Accessibility considerations

For the Viallotti restaurant website, the text on each page uses bigger text’s size, more legible font and higher contrast for users with reading problems; also there would be an option for screen readers.

What I learned

While designing the Viallotti cake website, I learned that first comes user and then my designer. Then I realized that my ideas must meet customer’s needs. I was surprised when I got positive feedback from cake lovers who are looking forward to final website.

I also learned how to manage many projects at the same time. This website was big challenge especially when choosing colors and pictures. I found out more about material.io and websites like unsplash.com. That was very helpful to know when I was designing first few wireframes on paper.

I hope feedback and usability tests will help improve the filter system of items in order page so then there will be more happy customers.

I’m thankful to peers who reviewed my assignments. I appreciate their feedback and their time. Also I must thank the participants who were testing the website and filter system, without them there would be no improvements at all.
Moving forward, I would like to conduct another round of usability testing to validate whether the pain points my users experienced have been fully resolved. I’m looking forward to the next challenges.