Rethinking BABS Burrito’s website
UX Case study — Ironhack
My second UX/UI project at Ironhack required me and my team to help a local business who have suffered a decrease in demand of their products and services due to the COVID-19 situation.
Project contributors: Carolin Sauer, Desi Ubachs, Farah Lahcene,& Valeria Costantini
Client
Babs Burrito’s is a Tex-Mex restaurant in Maastricht (Netherlands). As most of the restaurants all over Europe, due to COVID restrictions Babs has been forced to close its physical shop since the beginning of the pandemic, and to sell its products online, through delivery apps and its website.
Business Research
At the first stage of our research process, my team and I interviewed Babs’ owner, Lynnel, in order to understand his goals and to provide a solution to improve the store’s online presence.
The owner of the restaurant told us that he aims to increase the orders coming in from their own website. Right now you can find Babs Burrito’s on several delivery Platforms, as Just Eat or Uber Eats. However, the main goal would be to have people ordering directly from the restaurant’s website in order to avoid to rely on external services, increase the revenues and most of all, provide clients with the unique Babs’ style customer care.
Competitors Analysis
From the competitors analysis we figured out that what are BABS selling points, especially its DYI menu, meaning the possibility for the customers to personalize their own burrito. We also could observe a major gap in the market regarding the lack of real pictures of the meals, which also turned out to be a sensitive feature for customers, based on reviews we read on Tripdavisor and other similar comparison shopping websites, as well as from our interviews with 5 users.
What stood out was that all competitors have their own website to sell their food, none of the competitor provides DYI menu, and only one competitor shows real pictures of their meals.
Time for Interviews
Stakeholder and Users Interviews
Firstly, we interviewed our stakeholder, Lynnel. As already been said, he is the owner of BABS Burrito’s and we wanted him to help us understand and define the business goals.
Goals are:
- Increasing orders from their own website and engage with clients directly instead of relying on external delivery services.
- Increasing revenues by avoiding to pay fees for those delivery services
Then, we interview 5 users and gather some information about their needs and frustrations when it comes to order delivery food.
We gathered and organized all the insights from our interviews into the Affinity Diagram below which helped us focus on some major issues:
Lack of good visuals/real pictures from restaurant
Time of delivery/speed
High price for delivery/minimum order amount
From this we created a user Empathy Map. The Empathy Map really helped us to think about and visualize what the user thinks and feels as well as their pains and gains. Our users wants to save time, support their locals, and see authentic pictures of the meals when ordering.
User Persona
Let me introduce you to Dana Deliver and Sunny Starter, our Primary and Secondary User Persona.
Let’s focus on Dana Deliver and her User Journey! To do this, we design her User Journey Map.
Dana Deliver is a student and we considered a scenario where she manages to come back home after a long day at the university. She’s really hungry and wants to eat TexMex Food. She has heard about Babs Burritos and search for it on Google. She finds out that they have their own website, but once surfing on it, she does not find her way around and concludes that the website is very confusing. She’s still very hungry and also a bit annoyed, she ends up ordering some food from a delivery platform.
Defining the problem
After designing the User Journey we were able to identify UX opportunities for our product and define our problem statement.
Moscow Method and MVP
We started to think about which features could be improved in order to achieve customers’ satisfaction and to do so, we relied on the Moscow Method.
We ended up focusing on the delivery tracking feature and to introduce real pictures of the meals.
We were eventually able to define our Minimum Viable Product(MVP) for BABS, which is a website where customers can order meals and get visual images of these meals, more convenient order process where they can track their delivery and get a service with loyalty programs.
Time to ideate and prototype
In order to get a visual idea of the structure and hierarchy of BABS new website, we firstly recreated their current sitemap and then we made some changes based on it. We focused on providing the user with a smooth and easy navigation. It should be quick, easy and engaging as well.
Before jumping to the next step, meaning the sketches and prototype of our website redesign, we also designed the User Happy Path, so the steps he should follow to simply make an order on the website.
We also played with Epics and User Stories to test if our proposal would be useful for our users. Some of them were:
“As a foodie student, I want to see real pictures of the food I’m going to order from the website of a restaurant, so that I don’t have to google each meal to see what it looks like.”
“As a foodie student, I want to get recommendations so I don’t have to read everything in the menu.”
“As a busy student, I want to be informed about my order in realtime so that I know when to be pick it up ”
“As a busy student, I want to sign up with my number/fb account/email so that I don’t have to re-enter all my informations again ”
Ready to sketch
As a team we brainstormed about the final product and all sketched our ideas. Each of us basically designed the User Happy Path and then, after some analysis, we pulled together the best ideas and details into our Low-fidelity wireframes.
The website we ideate is simple and gives the user the possibility to choose already from the homepage between pick-up and delivery.
During our interview with the stakeholders, we figured out that although their goal is to process the majority of the orders through their own website, they still want to be present on the most commonly used delivery platforms since they acknowledge that many people are used to order food from these apps, for several reasons. That’s why they decided to not develop their own CRM yet.
According to this insight, when ideating our User Happy Path we decided to move on with the Pick-up scenario. In this way, the user will make the entire order process on Bab’s website and get best prices, without any minimum order amount or delivery fees, and special discounts!
We created Mid-fidelity wireframes on Figma and then we tested our Prototype with some potential users in order to get some feedbacks.
Here you can take a look at our prototype:
Test and Feedbacks
Thanks to feedbacks we were able to make a list of what features we should keep or improve.
We noticed that our product was missing some elements that were negatively affecting the usability of the website. We made some adjustments that would improve the user experience like the image on the left shows. On our first prototype, the user was not able to change the items inside his basket (add/remove). After testing we prioritize what feedbacks should be implemented into our final prototype for Ironhack presentation of the project.
Finally, we defined what to develop or improve for Hi-fidelity prototype.
Conclusions & Next Steps
For the future, it would be nice to implement the changes we made in Mid-fi and turn them into Hi-Fi. Some features to improve or develop:
- Add basket icon in the header
- Move the order basket to the top instead of the bottom
- Design and implement a section for customizable burritos since it’s one of the main selling points of BABS Burrito’s
- Remove the newsletter and focus more on discount program.
