Taylor's Tacos: Let's Taco'bout a New Mobile Experience
Project Overview
In this project, our team had two and a half weeks to redesign Taylor's Tacos' website to accommodate her current catering customers and new taco shop customers with a mobile website.
The Design Team
Marcos Vera- UX Designer & Research Specialist
Jess Kwok- UX Designer & Technology Specialist
Greg Nye- UX Designer & Graphics Specialist
The Client
Taylor's Tacos is Taylor Madison's passion project. What started as pop-up events in her West Chicago neighborhood soon turned into a full-fledged catering business. Now, by popular demand, she and her wife were opening their first brick-and-mortar restaurant.
Who is eating these Tacos? DISCOVERING the User
We started our research by surveying 50 participants to see if we needed to completely split the website into a catering side and a Taco Shop side like the client suggested, or if the different customers had overlapping needs.
Though trends were similar for both sides of the business, catering customers worried about logistical issues that weren't important when going out for a meal (e.g. Available Dates). To better understand the complexities of the catering experience, we conducted 7 interviews with participants who had recently worked with a catering company. From our interviews, we created an affinity map and distilled some key takeaways:
Next, we started synthesizing the interview data into a persona and decided to focus on the catering side both because our data showed that the catering experience enveloped key themes present in the restaurant going experience, and because the not yet open Taco Shop didn't have enough data on their clientele to make an in-depth persona for that side of the business.
Options on the Menu:
DEFINING the Problem
Having synthesized our data into our persona, we moved on to defining the core problem affecting our user: Lara needs to find a proactive and flexible caterer and be confident that they offer quality food so that she can focus on her guests instead of stressing out about the catering.
To share our research with our stakeholder, we created a journey map to illustrate how this problem affects her clients. We worked through the journey with Taylor and compared our research to her current process. From there we made a second iteration of the map that also showed Taylor's Tacos' current process.
Our new journey map showed that both our users and our client were having an issue with the online booking process. While some customers were ready to submit a full order through their form, others were only seeking a consultation. Many of these people needing a consultation were submitting full orders which caused unneeded work for the Taylor's Tacos team. All of this led to the first feature we'd add to her site: a general inquiry form. To find what other features we could implement, we held 3 brainstorming sessions.
Our brainstorming session showed us that we needed to try to pre-emptively answer questions that our customers would have and display information as clearly as possible so we decided to implement a general inquiry form, a FAQ page, a sortable menu, and an availability calendar. I created a storyboard to show our client how these simple features would have a powerful impact for her and for her customers.
DEVELOPING the Flavor:
LA Taste,
Chi-Town Voice
Once we defined our key features, we needed to start sketching the flow of how these features would work. With our task flows created, we started hand sketching what our screens might look like through a series of rapid iterations.
After our team came to agreement on the basic structure of our low-fi wireframes, we digitized the design and created our mid-fi prototype so that we could start doing usability testing as soon as possible.
As we tested our mid-fidelity prototype, we also started working on defining the visual design of the new site. Taylor was clear that she wanted her site to communicate both authentic tacos and authentic Chicago. We were able to balance the influences by using colors inspired by the LA Sunset (California is where Taylor learned to make tacos while she was in college) and a voice inspired by Chicago slang. With the brand defined, we created the style guide that we would use to create our high-fidelity model.
Taste TESTING:
Try it Before you Serve it!
To start our usability testing, we created our testing plan and then did a mix of in-person observation and remote testing using Maze. The first thing we learned in testing was that we could not rely solely on the hamburger menu for site navigation.
From our testing, we created multiple iterations to find the best Call to Action buttons for our home screen. As we continued to test, we saw usability increase for all of our features, except the FAQ test was performing significantly worse than our other features.
We found that our testers were failling at the two same points. In the hamburger menu, users were selecting "I have a Question" instead of the FAQ, which was taking them to the contact page. On that page, our FAQ link was getting lost on the bottom of the page and people were trying to use the call to action buttons instead. To solve the issue, we removed the "I have a question link" and swapped the Call option with a link for the FAQ page.
Order Up: DELIVERING the Final Product
By the end of the project, both our team and our client were ecstatic about the work we had done. After the presentation, our client hired a Chicago-based developer to implement what we had done and continue building it into a desktop model. In our final meeting, we were able to pass along our deliverables to her new team so that her website would be ready by the time her Taco Shop opened.